PEACE, JOY, AND THE PLAYGROUNDS IN YOUR MIND
When I was a kid...(That’s a good way to start a speech you know because. You’ve got that in common with everyone in the audience.)
Well back in the Flintstone Age I had a favorite Park playground and I would guess many of us did. Many of us also had a classic swing set out in the yard. Today I was thinking about a couple pieces of playground equipment that were popular and yet would never be around today. There was the sit down Meery-go-Round. There were two types of these, one was a solid piece of iron cut into a circle with some bars to hold on to while sitting or standing on it. Now one or two kids had to get the thing spinning so s/he would grab a set of these bars and start running around in a circle. Of course the never-stated but always known goal of the pusher was to run just fast enough to jump on and enjoy the ride. If that didn’t seem possible then the goal became to push hard enough so that someone was begging to get off. Now there was this other. Type of thing whichoperated on the same principle, gut the sitting place was a set of benches connected together instead. Now that was a trickier thing because if a rider lost his grip then he or she was spinning around holding on only with his/her legs hoping the rest of the riders were tall enough to get their feet to the ground so that this didn’t become a spinning, head banging device. Of course there were the monkey bars or jungle gyms as they were called in some placed. This was sets of metal bars welded or bolted together and kids went out to climb on them and hang from them. How many concussions did kids get from falling off these? After all a fall was either going to be to the ground or to the ground after hitting several steel pipes and other kids along the way.
So these things weren’t safe. Why did we love them so? It’s simple they were the places where our imaginations turned this spinning metal into a space ship or a race car. The monkey bars became a club house or a pirate ship or a castle. You see these were places we used our minds to imagine adventure, fun, and glory-filled possibilities.
Yet just like most of you there came a day when I was too big or too old for such things. What did I do with that left over imagination? Well until recently I used it to imagine my kids were going to get into a car wreck, or my best friends were all going to die young, or the next storm would drop basketball sized hail stones on our Jeep. For some reason I no longer imagined joyful things— I just used that mental energy to worry.
The thing is...I really rarely had control over how fans at that playground thing was going to spin or how crowded and slippery the jungle gym was going to be at any given time and today I don’t have control over the weather, the economy, or the size of hail. By the way why doesn’t hail get to have it’s own size? Couldn’t we have. Hail-sized golf balls just once?
Well to sum up I have been on a rant lately telling people “don’t worry.” I probably. Need to throw out the other part of the equation which is that there is far more peace and joy using that part of your mind to imagine better possibilities, new songs, better ways to cook the same olds foods, and different ways to treat people who are not friends yet.
Oh and the next time I get the chance I am going to find the most dangerous piece of playground equipment at some old park and go for a spin because the universe is out there waiting for us to explore!
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