Ikigai Thought for Today: Pausing for Puddles
When deadlines and commitments are driving you, embrace the approach of a child.
Audio narration by David Marlow
If you are going on an adventure, you need the right shoes. My grandkids and I go on adventures, not simple walks, oh no, not for us. They are wild adventures.
When her older brother started school, my granddaughter, C, proclaimed that she and Grandpa would go on adventures together, just the two of us.
And since then, we have done exactly that in our brightly colored adventure shoes.
This is Miss C; those curls are all-natural, by the way. She gets them from her grandmother.
She decided she wanted to push the stroller, and shortly after, we did the puddle thing at her request.
Not the usual jumping and splashing, instead, Miss ‘C’ had a different idea. Stepping in the puddles, watching the ripples, and then making footprints on the path.
I would have simply walked around them on my own; through my granddaughter's eyes, they became a source of wonder.
What do we miss when we use only the lens of busy adults? When deadlines and commitments are driving us?
One of the great things about grandchildren is that the "have to's" disappear in many ways. Time is focused more on experiencing and simply being.
There's a lesson in that for all of us, regardless of what point in life we are at now.
Enjoy experiencing life simply.
And who might we become?