Children are weird. As young people we want to do peculiar things for fun that as adults become chores. For example, there are toys like lawnmower toys, play washing machines, toy pooper scoopers.
What has become mundane in our adulthood is often the most fascinating to a child. I try to be conscious of this and still try to see the world as a child would, to never tire of even the most banal detail of life. Everything is magical to a child. I want to always be this way.
I remember being very young and playing store or something with my younger sister. We got a hold of our mother’s checks and started writing all over them and making up amounts and fake signing them, playing with the carbon copy paper. The veritable thrill of ripping it out of the checkbook made us repeat it over and over. We were intrigued by it because it was something we didn’t understand, we were not permitted to do, and because there is something enchanting about perforated lines and carbon paper.
To hide the evidence, we tore up the checks into tiny pieces, something we had also seen our mother do with discarded checks. Our catastrophic flaw in this adventure was that we decided to flush the pieces down the toilet. When our mother came home she saw the overflowing toilet and all of the waterlogged pieces of checks flooding onto the bathroom floor. We got in huge trouble that day, and this is when I learned that certain things can’t be flushed down the toilet.
There are still articles that carry this childhood mysticism for me. In college sometimes I would go to the library to study and nap. One day I noticed a little silver bell on the librarian’s desk, to alert them that you are present. Again, these are one of those items I always wanted to play with as a kid, but my mother would grab my little hands every single time as soon as she saw me go to tap the bell. I convinced the librarian that those bells were a moronic idea for a library because they were loud in an otherwise soundless building. So she let me have it.
I took it home barely able to contain myself because I couldn’t wait to fulfill my childhood dream from many years back. I placed it on my desk at home and tapped it. The resounding chime made me smile. I have kept this bell on my desk for 15 years now because whenever I remember, I ring it to remind me that life’s pleasures can come from the simplest things. It makes me smile every single time without fail. What a wonderful object then; something that can make me smile on demand. I like that life can be this simple sometimes.
On Day 42 of my 365 Release, I’m letting go of this cherished bell, because lately I have found an internal reminder that makes me smile every single time I close my eyes; I have found peace. It’s taken me over 3 decades, but I finally found it. May we find pleasure and beauty in even the simplest things around us. May we all find happiness in life.
1 thought on “YK’s 365 Release: Day 42”