I was born with a gift for fantasy. My wildest imagination is, quite possibly, much wilder, with more colors and details, than the average version. I could spend a whole day lost in it. Which is kind of like being nowhere and anywhere all at once. It is both a comfort and a distraction, one minute: my saving grace, the next: my greatest weakness.
I am never bored.
My children are bored very much of the time. These August days are too hot, too unstructured, too lacking in peers. I tell them: "this is ok. Being bored makes your brain grow. You can't think up cool things to do if you're not first bored."
"Give me something to look forward to," pleads one of my first-born sons. He folds his sweaty eight-year-old body up in my lap, arms around my neck, head buried into my collar bone. "I just need to know that something fun is going to happen. Please."
It is tempting. I want to soothe his mid-summer angst. I want to promise him excitement and adventure, some small incentive to keep loving life, the will to seek and find joy. But I know that what he needs, really, is to learn how to just be, and that now, when he's relatively small, when his brain is still growing by leaps and bounds, is the time to learn it.
If you are always living in the what-might-come-next, hoping each moment for a future moment, are you ever actually living any of it?
How do I teach them to do something that I have not yet learned how to do myself?
I woke up this morning to find a parade of miniature animals underfoot, eagerly marching all the way from the boys' bedroom into mine. The littles were so pleased with themselves, with the distance covered by their plastic pals, and perhaps even with their own initiative, their cooperative effort. I was pleased, too.
"Where do you think they're going?" I asked, groggily, half-awake.
"Huh? Oh, they're just going. They don't even need to know."
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