Amazement. (Where, where?)
Excuse me? Amazement? During this current chaos? Is someone handing me a (huge) winning lottery ticket? Santa Claus is visiting in March? A Sasquatch is banging on my front door? What? What!
Not Saint Nick, nor a large winning lottery ticket (sigh), or a lonely Sasquatch hoping for company. But, amazement. In everyday life.
Ok.
How do you get there? Is a secret doorway to amazement lying in wait? Do I need to purchase tickets for this particular destination? Oh, wait, this is the digital age; could there be a passcode?
Slow down, I first need to apologize. I fear I’ve not been clear. This is a very particular kind of amazement. A surprise visitor, filled with amazement, long thought to have disappeared. The password is “KID.”
Yes, KID. The KID that we adults are often so embarrassed by when she/he suddenly re-emerges in our daily lives. Shouldn’t I have outgrown that occasionally rambunctious, punning, funny kid inside me? I’m an adult, for heaven sakes!
But, but, but…making funny faces, or creating made-up words was such fun! And, of course, when eating food I adored, conducting a symphony of joy with my fingers waggling in the air. Caught up in the inner music of my culinary joy.
Amazement, on call, served up by my own funny and rambunctious, still alive, inner KID. And, by whom I’m so embarrassed when she suddenly re-emerges in the presence of other adults.
There’s absolutely no denying, however, that light, and lightness, stream back into my life when doing all these “childish” things. Amazement, too. A cheap ticket to temporarily lifting weight off my shoulders in difficult times.
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly.” C.S. Lewis
Clownery is such great medicine. Care to join me? (Don’t mean to be a nag, but do remember your password - KID.)