What is your Highlight?
How do you teach the next generation to be grateful? They have unfathomable access to information and enough plastic, practically disposable toys that hold interest for minutes. So much MORE to process, dissuade you from human connections; what are parents left to do? You can’t lock children away, or if you did their soul would be equally damaged from the captivity. From the lack of trust that they could make decisions for themselves. So when they are small, while they look to you for affection and direction, you must take advantage of instilling habits that bury deep in their subconscious.
One such family does this nightly over dinner. A discussion between parents, two daughters and also their doggy. They each must identify ONE favorite part of every day. Some days might prove difficult to choose only one, while the afternoons where the littles have had “hard times” they might need to scrounge further. But always, they are reminded there is a glimmer somewhere and they must learn to identify it.
I must share with you the beauty in the “highlights” of this four-year-old and two-year-old.
“Eloise, what is your highlight?”
“My highlight is YOU!” she says looking at me with a mischievous smile and a half bite of cheese quesadilla. I choke back a moment because this compliment overwhelms me. To be someone’s highlight? Well that is all I ever want.
We had been playing “Baby Bunny,” her the baby bunny and I the momma bunny ready to soothe her when she inevitably woke up “crying” in the night or needed to play hide and seek. We had read books; some I had remembered though the stories appeared more odd than ever. We connected tracks for a train and gymnastic flips on the pink mini bar. The places where imagination and connection converge. Make believe stories. Baby bunny a derivative of seeing Mom and Dad soothe her younger sister. Books bringing animals to life and teaching lessons of self-confidence and family dynamics. Charting tracks for trains of all kinds to make deliveries where needed. Physical feats of strength and performance with the gymnastics routine. Also getting stuck on top of the bar, slightly scared and processing how to get “unstuck” even if it requires a tumble.
When she said “YOU” I know she meant that we shared this opportunity to get lost in the dream state. A dream state though that is very much locked in step with the present moment. You are physically and mentally here and making choices. It was also a highlight because it had JUST happened. Eloise is so bright and emersed in questioning and learning about everything that she would have one million highlights. But since the highlight is relegated to one, it should be the most recent. And boy am I grateful.
For me, a single woman with no children, this invitation to play outside the realm of rational thought or beginning, middle and end was exhilarating. I know for parents how this daily occurrence can become tiresome because of the physical demands and the practical ones too of dinner, jobs, and tasks that also demand time. But the freedom to play and get lost with another in imagination with irrational accompanying emotions is an opportunity not to be missed. As an adult, we’ve been conditioned such to have a thesis, to prove things, to multi-task. Baby bunny doesn’t have a reason to want to tie a whale that is also a mermaid’s hair into a knot. We don’t need to dwell on the train that leads to the rug where it will tip and get caught in the parachute. The play is IT. It’s a conversation with a part of the mind we overlook. I dare say a closer expression to the soul’s desires. The reality we create.
So what reality do we choose to create? Do we dare to trust the parts of our brain that know what we cannot prove entirely? Is love definable? Is the desire I have to hug someone, or to touch a tree, or call someone out of the blue insignificant? Children haven’t forgotten and it would do us good to let them help us remember.
“JJ, what is your highlight?”
“HOME,” she says with confidence. It has apparently been her daily highlight for some time and I think it’s the wisest most flattering answer to the family’s dynamic.
She, just two, doesn’t need a ton of words yet. Her older sister has more than enough to say so she chooses her own as she sees fit. She doesn’t need them to be teased out of her. Instead, she demonstrates her feats of strength, carrying two dolls, a school bus and a water bottle at once. It’s no problem to pick up a heavy bin and dump it out or bounce so much on the trampoline the trampoline itself hops slightly too.
Home. Her highlight. The moments with her parents, her sister, her toys, her books. The place she knows best and can be comfortable. To value home, your unit, to already be grateful for where you wake up and go to bed. This is wisdom and due credit is offered to her parent’s for creating the loving environment that every kid deserves but so few get.
Both of these girls are fearless in their own ways. Eloise, fearless to speak her mind. To question everything. JJ, fearless to test the limitations of her body and space and rules. This combination is the result of excellent witnesses/parents who let them be exactly who they are. To choose who they are and to be grateful for their circumstance.
If you don’t memorialize these moments, these highlights, then they never get a chance at becoming a memory or a reminder that presence and your ability to wake to it is readily available. These highlights have the opportunity to instill gratitude despite days with uncertainty and upheaval.
My highlight is getting to see this so readily on display.
