No Map Required

When I was a child I felt like I wasn’t allowed a lot of control or freedom. It seemed to me  that my time was not my own, that I was scheduled into everything. Keep him busy swimming, skating, hiking, biking. “Just get him to do something and get him out of the house!” If you looked at my child from outside my family you would say I was blessed to be offered all these options, these activities, THESE what some people would call opportunities.

I was blessed and am still blessed by what some of the activities offered to me, the skills they taught me, the friendships (even if they are gone) that were able to form during the time spent in the activity. When I was in the middle of all the activity all I wanted to do was slow down, hang out. I wonder what it is about me that longs to do nothing. Is it the fact that I have never really spent much time doing nothing? The grass is always greener I guess. My wife can attest to the fact that I am miserable when I am doing nothing, I am not used to it, I go crazy, my heart starts to hurt from the lack of adrenaline… So why do I crave it? I am addicted to what I don’t get to experience.

I guess when I think back at how busy I was as a child I long for my children to have TIME, to just kick back and bore themselves to death, to create their own adventures, to explore and have unlimited options as to what they do and don’t do with whatever little time they have on this planet. The question is will they? Will they use the unstructured time we give to them wisely or will they just rot their brains on television? Am I that powerful to “give” my children time? Who do I think I am?

Why am I concerned with my children rotting their brains? Rotting my brain with music and TV is exactly what I longed for. What is it about being a parent that makes us want to program our children’s time? Maybe we program their time with adventures or opportunities we wish we had growing up, only to later realize that something that is programmed is not an adventure, it becomes something we must do, which in turn becomes something we avoid because everything we must do obviously isn’t something we chose to do or want to do.

Art and Adventure need to be self created, if it is scheduled or programmed it becomes someone else’s (mine the parent) idea of what adventure is, but for the person who is told they must experience it becomes something less than tolerable. It becomes dull, work. Can we all agree that we have too much time for work and not enough time for adventure.

I think I will explore this a bit more, but maybe later.