Saturday, February 07, 2015

The Little Things

A blog post from November 13, 2012 - on another blog I had but have since deleted. 

"We must look carefully, therefore, not only at life’s large defining moments but also at the seemingly small moments. Even small acts and brief conversations count, if only incrementally, in the constant shaping of souls." Neal A Maxwell


Yesterday I took the kids outside to the playground. Sometimes it's hard for me to just be out there watching them with not enough energy to get up and play and I couldn't seem to stop yawning either! But on that day my kids noticed a bug on the playground wall. On closer inspection it looked like a very old (and large!) ladybug with no spots at all. It even had a limp, or at least that's what it looked like. The kids were so enthralled by this one tiny little bug  Whenever the kids would get too close the ladybug would stop and pull it's legs in, and after awhile get up and start moving again. After awhile Joseph decided to give the ladybug some obstacles he grabbed sticks and put them in the ladybug's way. Sometimes she would climb over them and sometimes she would go down around the side of the wall and back up on top. After sometime you could see a string of sticks evenly placed on the wall and all of a sudden it looked like Bug Olympics and Joseph was the coach.
For some reason that very insignificant event seemed very not insignificant. It was a moment of just seeing the world as my kids do and finding joy in simple things, something I haven't done in a long time. I'm really grateful for my kids, and their unique perspective on life. I'm grateful for small moments of sharing an experience with them.


“Grand drama and ecstatic moments do not make a life good. Life is an everyday affair, and the sum total of unremarkable, daily happenings define its quality. In the prosaic novel, heroes and heroines who live for extreme moments misunderstand what life is... Many can perform heroic actions in the sight of all, but few posses the courage to do small things right without recognition” ~ Gary Saul Morson