Learning to Give Space for Imagination
Each night after supper, we gather our three toddlers, lace up our sneakers, and walk down to the old railroad tracks. My husband pushes the twins in our double stroller and I push the four-year-old on his tricycle, and we bump along down the path through potholes, puddles, and large rocks. On the way home, Daniel plows ahead with the stroller, but the four-year-old climbs off his trike at the bottom of the hill across from our house and meanders along behind me.
When we first started doing our walks again in the early spring, I used to get annoyed with how long he took to climb the hill; he loves to pick flowers, grass, weeds, rosehips, crab apples, and branches to add to his “collection” (which is a pile of dried up vegetation in our garage). I would haul the tricycle up the path behind me, and every time I turned around to see where he was, I’d find him only a few steps further than he was the last time. He stoops every few minutes to collect another piece of nature.
I find it hard to not get antsy. I feel like an ant under a magnify-glass with this summer heat. I know bedtime is just around the corner once we walk through the doors, which means less than an hour is left before I can click away on my keyboard again. Yet despite my pleas to move quicker, my four-year-old still takes his time walking up the hill.
Our world is one of hurry, bustle, and get-that-checklist-scratched-out. If there’s not a finished product to show, perhaps it’s not all that productive. Yet as I watched my son toddle up the hill, I saw someone else: My younger self.
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