The other day my son came home with a bunch of clay figures that he had made.  They weren’t fired but they were painted.  He had made most of them thin enough where they would dry entirely on their own.  The next morning he pulled one out of the box and he started bending one of them and it eventually broke.  I thought he was going to be extremely angry.  I was about to start in on my usual admonishment, “This is why you need to be careful,” etc. etc.  but I stopped myself.  I saw he wasn’t crying or upset or even frustrated.  Instead he looked at me and he said, “Now I have two!”.  My heart swelled at him in that moment.  Kids are awesome and I don’t understand how we all lose the capacity to have that type of acceptance, curiosity, and creativity.  There’s an innate understanding that things don’t stay the same so when they break or change form there isn’t anything wrong with that.  They IMMEDIATELY see the possibility instead of the obstacle.

I had such a hard time with this forever because my husband and I and our friends and family members would spend so much money buying toys that ultimately got destroyed.  I’m quite aware of the amount of time it takes for people to get that kind of money so I don’t just see dollar signs, I see people’s (and my) work—and I’d been raised to have respect for the things people gave me so if I saw something broken, I was quick to say things like, “X didn’t buy that for you to break it,” not understanding that destruction wasn’t the intent—curiosity was.  There’s an innate need to see what things can do and what they can become.  Kids have a desire to see how things work, to know how they work, to see what they can do with it.  And how awesome it is to see possibility.  Given where we are in the world, I think we all need more time with possibilities. 

Such a simple shift in mindset has stuck with me for days now.  I know I have many an opportunity to see where the things that have broken didn’t become diminished, they multiplied.  Truthfully, we are all human and it takes a lot of patience and training to make that second nature.  Especially if there is something we’ve spent a lot of time and energy on.  No one wants to see their efforts destroyed.  No one wants anything to fall apart.  But for those things we have no control over, the things where deterioration/destruction are inevitable, why don’t we find the bright side.  And if we subscribe to the idea that energy is neither created or destroyed then there is no need to become upset when things change.