Take Life Like a Kid: Learn to Play With It

Today I stopped to talk with the lady who makes the perfect mocha latte at the company where I work. I’ll call her Gil.

Gil was her usual warm and relaxed self. Nothing about her outward display was curious nor disturbing. Nothing could’ve prepared me for what she said when I asked about her newborn child and what she’d decided for a name.

Instead, she told me there had been complications. She told me her child — a mere few days old — had passed away.

My mind immediately wandered back to the night before when I was feeling fearful and sad and ugly. And now? Now I just felt stupid. Stupid because of my Oscar-worthy tearfest the night before and the incomprehensible irony of the scene playing out before me.

Here was this woman happily making coffee for employees who were just trying to get through the rest of the day so they could finally go home to their families. And all I could think was how she couldn’t go home to hers.

Her newborn baby had barely begun breathing and here I was breathing just fine and hadn’t stopped to notice. So I did. I took a deep breath and went on to do what I think most people in my situation would’ve done: Ask her how she did it. Ask her how she was still able to face the day and smile and make small talk and at least seem okay.

For some reason I expected her answer to be Thoreauvian if not profound. Rather, it was clear and simple: She did it because she had to. She had to go on. Because ultimately life, after death, goes on.

Her answer made me think about many things. Random yet weirdly related things. One of these was a particular scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind, wherein an inert and forlorn John Nash asks his wife, “What do people do?” To which she replies, “It’s life, John. Activities available. Just add meaning.”

Life = Activities + Meaning.

This is easily the hardest problem any of us will ever be faced with. So much that many of us I daresay are too daunted to even try. And those who do are likely to find their perseverance wane and frustration win with every failed attempt.

If you’re like me, you definitely have the first variable — the activities part — figured out. After all activities aren’t hard to come by. Brushing your teeth. Buying groceries. Walking the dog. Anything that uses up time is an activity.

Using up time is easy. It’s effortless and automatic and happens without us even knowing it. It’s adding to the time — finding and filling in the meaning part — that’s hard. That’s where so many of us get stumped. That’s where so many of us struggle and are tempted to give up.

And if you’re like me, you’re still struggling and have no intention of giving up. Why? Because we both know that without meaning, life just doesn’t add up. The equation is incomplete. We are incomplete.

And like you, this sense of incompletion eats at me. Every day I wonder what my life is adding up to. If it’s even adding up to anything. And like you, I’m worried that it’s not. That my life is being subtracted but not added to.

Then I meet people like Gil. I listen to her story. And life, even if only for a moment, stops being so hard. It stops being an equation. A puzzle to solve and reason and wrestle with.

In fact life takes on a new form altogether. That of a gift. A present to accept and appreciate and play with. Because if you think about it, life really is a gift. We didn’t earn it. We didn’t buy it. It was just given to us. Just because.

And what do we do when we receive a gift? We take it and say thank you. We don’t ask, “What’s the meaning of this?” and we certainly don’t start to inspect and iterate on everything we don’t like about it! And yet I’ll admit that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’m the kid who got a gift that wasn’t exactly the one she’d wished for. She focuses on the gift and not the gesture and gets grumpy and refuses to eat. She complains and compares her gift to others’, asking why theirs is prettier, shinier, and more popular than hers. I hate those kinds of kids. Yet here I am behaving no better.

So I’m doing to myself what I would do to that kid: Tell them to shut it.

Shut it or Cocoa Puffs is no longer on the breakfast menu. Stop complaining and start creating. From now on I’m going to be the kid I would want to call my own.

The kid who can take any gift and run with it. The kid who makes a wand out of a flashlight. The kid who makes wings out of the pages of a book.

The kid for whom the greatest gift is that of her own imagination.

The kid Gil’s baby would no doubt have grown up to be.