…Recapture the childlike feelings of wide-eyed excitement… ~ Wayne Dyer
Category: Children
Things You Can’t Get Back
- Time
- Your kids as children
- Thoughtless words
- Youth (different from time in a way)
- Virginity
I was going to put innocence on the list, but I think older people can circle back to being innocent in their senility.
The other things on the list we should think about before we toss them away.
Kindness
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~ Plato
Kindness. What is it? Is it a thing? No. It’s an attitude. Or an aptitude. Kindness is something we have or we don’t. But if we don’t have it naturally, it’s hopefully something we can learn.
It can be one of those things you learn at home. Your mom and dad might have been kind. Or not. We have some much baggage from our families, don’t we? I know I do. We take the good things and mistrust them. We take the bad things and dwell on them. It’s almost impossible to see how people grow up to be kind, even if they don’t have it modeled for them as children. But they do. Somehow, there are many people who understand Plato’s sentiment. We are all fighting this battle called life. We need to treat each other with the kindness of a soft bunny.
Wouldn’t that be a lovely world to inhabit? I wonder how that would be. I am hoping to find out by starting to be kinder to myself. Selfish? I don’t think so. I think I would treat people more kindly if I had a softer spot for my spirit to enjoy.
Kindness is easier if we’re grateful. For more on being grateful, check out my blog on enough.
Thank you. Kindly.
Leave Room in Your Suitcase
So, did you think this post was going to be about travel? Great. It is. But, it’s not.
Hopefully, we are all going somewhere. However, we are not always going on vacation. Or going out of town. Or going on a safari, per se. We are, however, traveling through life. We need to have our suitcase packed, our selves ready, open, and available to step, fly, jump, and fall forward into the next place. Our metaphorical bags should always be packed, as in why slow down to throw in a toothbrush when the next adventure may have toothbrushes waiting for you at the other end? Or better yet, we won’t need toothbrushes there at all. Our teeth will automatically be cleaned by busy nanobots grinning as they scrub, singing happy tunes, and making you happy to boot.
So while the suitcase should be ready to go, it should have room to add stuff. We want to leave space in the suitcase of our minds to put in cool new ideas, experience an image in a way we’ve never done so before, or taste a new aroma, or savor a different apple with a cool name like “Jazz” or “Envy.”
We save a spot for experimentation. We can pause in the quietness to read an author we wouldn’t have tried without the clarity that white space in a suitcase brings. We can “hear” a not-my-usual color; “wear” a not-my-kind of music. (Not typos: Hear a color and wear music were on purpose.)
I invite you on your next journey to leave room in your suitcase. In fact, I will leave room in mine, too, and maybe we can meet in the middle.
Always keep a bag packed!
Life’s a Crapshoot
Did you watch it? The storybook Royal Wedding? What did you take from it? That there’s no predicting life. No one would have thought a Hollywood starlet would marry an honest-to-goodness prince. Well, not in real life. In stories. In movies. On TV. But not for real. But it was. Real.
Rolling the Dice
Back in 2006, I was becoming increasingly aware of egg donors facilities. Yes. I was pretty amazed that people were picking characteristics they wanted for their children and were buying eggs that they thought would make little people with those traits. What’s cool is that it doesn’t work that way. At least not yet. Thank goodness. For instance, neither of our children plays the piano by ear, but I do. On the other hand, I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag, but our younger son is crazy-good at drawing, painting, sketching, shading, faces (for gosh sakes), and composition. How nice a surprise. Right?
Is life a game of chance? I think it is deliciously so. In fact, I say throw all the eggs and sperm in a piñata and do a free-for-all blindfolded party burst. Then grab the gametes and zygotes that lie on the ground, smash them together and you’ll have a kid — any old kid, and the future means nothing, the past means nothing, and lineage has no meaning whatsoever. Birthrights mean doodly squat. The Kennedy clan has had more than its share of problems, right?
You can be born and given up for adoption. You can be born into squalor. You can come into the world with an affliction. You can start your life in a palace. And sometimes that, too, can be bad luck! What. Dee. Heck?
People that are born of two parents bring recessive and dominant genes to the party. The randomness of the different permutations produces hugely disparate kids of the same two parents, no matter how many kids they have. It’s the scary-wonderful, elegant and inelegant magic of it all. We keep doing it through the centuries, and sometimes we make a mess of it, and sometimes, it’s a beautiful thing, this life.
Life’s a crapshoot right from the beginning, and that’s all there is to it. There should be more, somehow, but there isn’t.
Temporary
We just dropped off our twenty-year-old son at the airport. He is so, well, twenty. After raising two boys to manhood, I know that Kahlil Gibran was probably right: Our children are only on loan to us.
I had heard it, but I didn’t have a clue of what that meant. When they were little, I fooled myself into thinking they were mine. But now I’m not so sure they ever were. Yes, they pretty much did what they were told—most of the time— because they didn’t know any better. However, those times didn’t last. And the boys often made their own decisions and mistakes, because that’s how they grew up. Childhood is temporary, as are many other things. The speed of our children’s progression to adulthood from the womb makes my head spin. Why is this?
If our children are on loan and temporary, then so are marriage (‘til death or divorce do us part), our age, our highs, and lows. The seasons come and go. Winter fades to spring, which yields to summer and on to fall. There is no constancy in life except the fluidity of movement of one moment to the next. There is never a time when everything comes to a screeching halt. Never. The idea of it is so unfathomable to humankind, that most religions have an afterlife. Good or bad, heaven or hell, it’s a continuation of now into the future. We are almost never here and now, because now is like a freight train with “then” before it and “someday” after it, and “here” lasts only until that freight train leaves the station.
That means that there is no real past when you’re in the present. We cannot retrieve our children as they once were. We cannot ever again feel them inside our bodies, in our arms, or on our backs. That was temporary—a phase that is no more. I am convinced of the temporary nature of the past. Why, then, can I not see that the future is a fleeting, unattainable bundle? How insane am I that I do not see this? We project forward as if there were a way to control the future. There is none. We prepare for the future, we save, we worry; we think we can control outcomes, but alas, the future has no bearing on the present. It will be what it will be. That does not mean we don’t try to achieve our goals. No, rather, it means we try to plan our lives so that we must live only in the present knowing that any other form of living must negate the thing of life itself. It is so rudimentary but almost impossible: many people spend more time outside of now than in, and it is no wonder that the passage of time blurs on its way through life’s train station.
If there is no “present thread” (maybe because it is invisible) holding this day together, then it pulls apart, like a sweater unraveling, and the fabric we think we’re wearing is naught but a tangle of yarn on our mind’s floor.
Because life is temporary, my kids are on loan, my mom, brother, and spouse are fleeting, and everything is but a smearing of consciousness. I must stop. I should grab the hands on the life’s clock, hold onto them like the devil, and slow them way down as if my life depended on it. Why? Because it does. It just does.
Kathryn Atkins 2006