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Today's
quotation:
Children
have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with
the
kind of respect that we are so confident it ought to be given.
To the irritation of authority figures of all sorts,
children expend
considerable energy in “clowning around.”
They refuse to appreciate
the gravity of our monumental
concerns, while we forget that if we were
to become more like
children our concerns might not be so monumental.
Conrad Hyers
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Today's
Meditation:
I definitely
want to be like children in this way. So many things
that other people find to be of the greatest importance
don't affect me in the slightest-- who won yesterday's
game, which television show was cancelled, what kind of
clothes a person is wearing, whether someone's shirt is
tucked in or not. And when we push our kids to take
such things as extremely important, we're also giving them
the gift of our personal biases, which very often they're
going to adopt as their own.
I
think most of us adults can take a great lesson from kids
in this way. Some of the things that we find to be
incredibly important really aren't, and we sacrifice much
of our lives trying to fulfill "important"
responsibilities that would have almost no effect at all
on us or anyone else if we didn't fulfill them, or if we
did them a couple of hours-- or a couple of days-- later. Yes, we have responsibilities to live
up to, and it's important to do so, but not everything
that we see as important really is so.
Are
we allowing the urgent to crowd out the important?
The most important thing we might do today is take an
hour-long walk by a lake or river. But we got that
text message from someone, and now we need to deal with
her or his issues. Or we absolutely must clean out
the whole garage today, and the walk that would help us to
clear our minds and calm ourselves down has to be put
off-- possible until never. And our social
responsibilities completely paralyze some people--
someone's coming over this evening, so I can't do
anything fun today because I have to clean the house.
We
can always learn a lot from the children in our
lives. They look at things with a different
perspective than we do, a perspective that we used to love
when we were their age, but which we now don't love
anymore because we've cast it aside for the adult things
which don't always live up to what they're supposed to
be. Perhaps today would be a good day to set aside
an hour or so to go exploring, or to draw for an hour or
two without a care about how good the drawings are.
We can rekindle our sense of wonder, and perhaps even
share it with some young person whom we know. Then
we'd both benefit.
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