Just a thought… The kid in you isn’t gone…. They’re just waiting for you to come back out. Give it to them. Often. [Carlos Whittaker @loswhit]
Seems like forever since I’ve written here; I guess I just needed some time to sit and think…and here we go!
As we live so far away from our grandkids, the highlights of both Rob’s and my week are updates on what they’re busy doing. 10-year-old Colin is killing it in his little league baseball, slugging homers, pitching winning games and helping out in the field and on base where he can. So far his team is 6-0-1 on the season, and Rob proudly takes a tiny bit of the credit for the time he spent in the yard playing baseball and hockey with them when the kids lived here.
While Jane, who’s five, is climbing the ladder of belts in her karate classes and loving it, it’s what she does while Colin’s lighting up the scoreboard that made me think of something I wanted to share today.
No matter where her brother’s team is playing, at home or away, Jane comes along with Mom and Dad (who both take turns coaching, too). No sooner have Brooke and Phil found a place to park than Jane is off like a shot to the nearby fields or playgrounds. And here’s what is so normal at her age, but so exceptional as we get older: she just finds other kids to play with. They say “hi,” ask if the other likes to play this or that (sometimes not even bothering to inquire), and then they basically play their brains out for as long as it takes Colin’s team to finish a game.
Hearing about her social butterfly attitude made me wistful for those days: the freedom just to run and do and laugh, to feel completely unfettered by shyness and judgment. But now as grown-ups, imagine how different our lives would be if we saw people having fun and just joined in!
I can count almost on one hand the number of times I’ve done that as an adult and I never, ever regretted it. Whether it’s singing along with people who are busking or are just strumming on a guitar outdoors, taking part in a rights march as we did in Seattle in 2017, or simply saying “why not?” to whatever looks like fun, the feeling of joining in without worrying how it looks or what people will say is simply liberating.
Just think of what we’d do if we didn’t care what others thought: you’d join that choir or walking/cycling group, audition for the play or sit with a stranger for coffee. The latter is what my podcast partner Lisa Brandt and I did this past final winter in California: we joined a woman who had a bike helmet on the table and was enjoying a brew by herself. Simply by asking and then sitting and talking with her, we learned that she lived across the street from Adam Sandler in LA, and that her swimming pool was filled with ashes from the fires that she’d come to Palm Springs to escape (the house on which she’d recently been refused homeowner’s insurance was uninhabitable).
I wonder how she’s doing….
These conversations and experiences, these connections, only come when we nudge ourselves out of our comfort zones. Whether it’s joining clubs, walking the streets of your own town or city, or even meeting someone online, the importance of taking chances, quieting those voices of judgment that we have heard most of our lives (some of us, even as children), and treating every day is if it’s our last, has to be driven home.
So I’ll leave you with these slides from a piece I stumbled upon yesterday on threads.com. (I’m there @erindawndavis if you care to join this gentler social platform). I hope they resonate with you as they did with me. And just maybe they’ll remind you that life is short, but summer is shorter and if you don’t do it this year, what are you waiting for?
