To Be Present

My grl's eyes are very dark. They are the color of the raisins that she ate (and then spit out) tonight. I love them. They look rounder than most eyes too; like the way a little kid would draw two eyes on a stick figure. There is a cheesy one year old boy out there who will someday say something to G like, "I could lose myself in your eyes." Ick. But then, I can understand that he might.

G looks at everything. She can spot a small piece of green trash, the size of a dime on an otherwise clean playground, from across the park. She will go to it, pick it up and look at it. Then of course she puts it in her mouth, but before she does, she gives the piece of wrapper her undivided attention. She really sees it. I suppose when absolutely everything you see is something new, that's what you do. She does this with books, flowers, that fuzzy that was stuck to her fingers the other day, dogs on the street, city birds out our window, strangers, mama, everything. She looks so intently, she seems to see something that I don't. It's sort of like that guy in American Beauty looking at the plastic bag floating in the wind.

It's amazing walking down the street how oblivious people seem to be of the world. So many people are plugged into various devices, they are missing so much, I think.

G misses nothing.

I have been trying really hard to be present these days, and see and look the way that G does, and value whatever it is that is right in front of me, and whatever time is happening right now. It's sort of hard to do, and today as I was trying to "be present," I think I ended up totally just zoning out.

I watched T's middle school baseball team play a game of wiffle ball recently. They were so fun to watch. They didn't seem to care about anything but right then and there, laughing as they slid around the gym floor running into each other.

When do kids loose that ability to be present? And why?

It's amazing how wise kids are, and how little credit we give them.