Finding the Swings

Even before knowing there was a reason, people were not at their best last Friday. My son’s 8th period had an emotional train wreck and my daughter explained her recess was ‘difficult’ because the kids playing four square were all so angry with each other, she ‘just couldn’t take it’.

Worse, she continued, when she went to sit on the swings, her ‘cool down’ place when things get too upsetting, there were no swings left to sit on.

Mostly, for the past few days, I’ve felt like that. Like there are no swings left to sit on, and even if there were, recess is over and the world must keep turning and all the tasks must continue to be accomplished and there is simply no time to stop and sit on the swings and cool down because — because there just isn’t.

Of course that’s just a perception, and perceptions, while they may have truth in them, are not entirely the truth.

So today, finally, I stepped out of the rush so I could do two things I’d been promising I would do for some time.

One is remember there is a blog here with my name on it that doesn’t need to be accomplished but it does need to be nurtured.

The second is to finally begin my message in a bottle experiment, which is this: to take those cheesy pirate message bottles from the craft store and putting messages in them, but only good messages, the kind that remind someone they matter.

Included in the bottles are the instructions to pass on the bottle with a new message to another someone, reminding them they also matter and, over time, more and more people will come to know we’re not as isolated as we think.

Admittedly, it’s not very scientific, and once I send them on their way, I have no idea if the bottles will continue to change hands. All I do know is, if nothing else, I’ll have done one positive thing.

I’ll have found the swings.

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