I posted this on another blog lately in response to the author’s musings about the writing process and doing life in general.  There was a line in her article about sometimes we have to reach out to new experiences and people and “ask if we can play too.”

“asking if we can play too” . . .  Maybe that is all that “become as a little child” means. 🙂  Very sweet.  I needed some sweetness today.  Thank you.  I am very new to all this blogging.  My grown children had to show me how to get started.  It’s kinda fun to be ignorant again.  Stupid has gotten old 🙂 .  Me just sticking my toe into these alien waters is so far from the “competence” I had grown accustomed to.  I have begun to shyly comment and follow (if those are the correct terms).  Each time I do I feel like an elementary school boy with his new cigar box filled with the smells of pencils and erasers and Elmer’s paste tucked under his arm.  I laughed in a good way at myself when I read that line.  So I guess this is the boy who still resides in and sometimes peeps out through these 51-year-old eyes asking if “I can play too”.

I have thought about this idea for some days now.  Wondering if that shy vulnerable place was a doorway that I have typically avoided.  And because I avoided it I have left something behind that now I must find a way to reclaim.  I vividly recall the sights and sounds and smells even some of the faces I encountered along the way.  I remember the sense of isolation and feeling exposed.  New school.  New boy.  New people.  Unknown.  It is interesting that I remember that feeling but don’t remember much of what happened to overcome it.  What did the boy do?  We moved quite a bit during my early school years so it was a familiar experience.  I think I began to piece together certain patterned responses to situations that merely got refined and updated through the decades and changing contexts.  Making touchdowns, being funny, thoughtfulness helped, being “smart” was a plus, and they were all a  part of finding a way to be in the loop.  But really it was more about avoiding being left out than actively pursuing being in.  I became quite competent in most situations and exceptional in a few.  But . . . and this is a huge but, I was still alone and for the most part unknown outside the roles I played in other people’s lives.  My identity and living became attached to other people’s needs, wants, and goals, and my ability to anticipate and respond adequately to them.  On many levels this is appropriate and good except that I stopped consulting that shy, inquisitive, creative little boy in me.  I left him behind somewhere and have orphaned myself.

There has always been a thought in my mind and heart usually just out of conscious reach but there just beneath the surface.  It was something to the effect of “One day after I have done enough, helped enough, sacrificed enough, achieved enough . . . then I could rest and do what I wanted, have what I wanted.”  The funny thing is that I never really knew what it was I wanted.  Even now it is still opaque, vaguely outlined in emotion more than a burning clear vision.  You see, I never asked the boy.  Never thought to, assuming that all he had to offer was weakness.  But now I think he knows, or at least he knows where to look.  So it seems I have become a clever man without much practice or knowledge of how to play, or let go, or just be.  I have left behind the childlike part of me and have injured myself.  But . . . and this is another big but, I find myself back where I left off.  Shy and vulnerable and unsure, working up the nerve to ask “if I can play too?”.  Perhaps walking through those doors long avoided will finally lead me to the place I have wanted to be for so long.  Be Groovy!