© Roz Van Meter, 2002, 2009
When you were a toddler (great word!) you found delight in almost everything. Your job was to learn about this world you’d been plunked down into, and you were overjoyed with experimentation.
You loved to splat your hands in the dog’s water bowl, check out stuff with your fingers and mouth, bang and unfold and peer and taste and shriek.
Delight was turned on, glowing brightly in your wonderful, fervent little spirit.
Who turned off Delight?
You did, for very sound reasons. You turned it off in order to MAKE IT in the world around you, to please the authority folks, to be found acceptable or stay out of trouble, or maybe, literally, to save your life.
You learned to be “appropriate.”
Parents feel an enormous responsibility to prepare their children for adult life. That is the well-meant reason they lay all the Shoulds and Oughts on their kids. You’re probably doing the same to yours, to help them learn what’s socially acceptable.
The problem is, sometimes those kids grow up to be so Appropriate that they don’t have a lot of fun. They mean to, but there just doesn’t seem to be time for much foolishness or even pleasure.
I recently visited San Diego, a paradise of a city. Down by the beach there was a percussion group, about eighteen people playing various kinds of drums. Each drum had its own distinct voice. The musicians were playing an ask-and-answer kind of rhythm, talking drums. The leader had a loud whistle in his mouth the whole time, and when he blew it, the conversation of drums shifted tempo, as if the subject had gotten changed.
People sat on the sea wall and listened, but a couple of toddlers and I seemed to be the only ones jigging our bodies to the rhythms. Sometimes it’s delicious to be immature.
The Power is still on inside! Punch out, shift gears, run through the sprinkler, eat more finger food, slurp some chocolate, bring your Beloved flowers, make love more often. S-l-o-w down.
Turn Delight back on!
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