To be quiet in spirit and believe in your pace, your way of doing things.~Journal entry, May 2022

It is December. Hard to believe we have turned the page to the last month of 2022. Many are taking their Christmas decorations from the attic and lacing lights through branches of pine boughs, stringing bursts of white light around windows. Last night I walked about our condo complex under a bright moon, soft tendrils of air blowing my bangs away from my face, warm for the last evening of November. I felt the embrace of the holiday season, lights blinking, casting blue and red shadows on the pathway as I made my way around the circle. I came home, lit a candle, made myself a cup of peppermint hot chocolate and grabbed my journal. I wanted to reflect upon the previous months of 2022. What had I come away with? What did I need to remember?

I wrote that I often live life attempting to control things I can't--like trying to eat Jell-O with a fork, the gelatin slipping from the tines. I people please too much and write out lists of shoulds that I never reach. I don't listen to myself. 

I read further...

As I reviewed the journal entries, I realized I'd contemplated what I loved as a child. And that has helped my adult, been an antidote to loneliness and feeling less stressed out by our performance-based culture. When I was about five, I enjoyed a backyard with a swingset and a sandbox. I swung for hours, singing and thinking, my gray cat a companion. He sat in the grass, watching the blue jays flit amongst the oak trees. Sometimes he sat in my lap. I had a satchel filled with books and several notepads. I read the story books and wrote in the tablet. Sometimes two neighborhood siblings would join me. My mother was in the house and regualrly checked on me. But primarily, I enjoyed my own company, my unhurried pace.  At peace with simple pleasures. I often thought of God in my safe place, sensed in my childlike mind that He was good--as if he was passing by and smiling that the person he'd created was happy, the blueprint for adulthood already in motion.

I wrote in my journal, "The child often knows what's best for the adult." I realize that my "playground" as an adult, is the page. Writing is the location I find I'm most myself--the beauty of words on the screen, the sound of my fingers flying over the keyboard. The glowing candle. Music. The joy of creating. The unhurried pace. Perhaps God still passes by my study and receives pleasure from my pleasure--as any good father would.

Where would your child take you? Go there.