This is your invitation to feel better than you have in a long time. I dare you.
The other day I was on a walk and suddenly something moved me to cut through a field of shin-high grass. I just took off. No overthinking. No, “I’ll get my shoes all wet in the morning dew.” “Why would I cut through the grass?” NOPE. None of that “adult mind talk.”
I was like a six-year-old version of myself. Galloping and romping. Jumping here and there over branches and other “invisible” stuff.
My husband was with me and he stayed on the road. (He let his mind talk him out of the adventure.) I heard him say as I got about 20 leaps into the field, “You’re going to be soaked!” I replied just like a kid, “No, I won’t and so what if I do?!”
He was right, I was soaked up to my knees. And it was cold outside. BUT I FELT ALIVE. Exhilarated. Like a kid without worry. And it felt so good.
When I got home. I sat with that for a moment. I let it sink in. I pondered how it is that we lose that openness, that wild wonder, that notion that EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. Because when you’re a kid, everything is possible. You might flap your arms fast enough to actually fly. Maybe. You don’t discount it. Someday you think, I’ll be ____________. Insert your big dream, the one you let go of after you grew up and enough people said it was stupid or not possible.
I MISS that feeling of absolute freedom, don’t you? And when we lose it, we lose creativity, passion, and joy. That comes into play in our work and home life, too. We can’t live up to our potential if we don’t have or express our wonder and vulnerability. Our sense of play and abandonment.
So, I am choosing to feel it as often as I can again. I don’t mean to the point of being irresponsible. Just enough to let go of some of that “adult mind talk” that often stops me from being fully alive and joyful.
Simply CHOOSE to get out of your head sometimes. FEEL JOY no matter what is going on around you. WE ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE.
Take off running through the wet grass on your morning walk. Plop down in a field and gaze up at the clouds. Skip down the hallway at work. Shake your whole body around like a rag doll as you jump up and down. It feels soooo good! Life is supposed to be fun. Be five or six or seven again. Just for a few moments each day. It will shift your life and the lives of those around you. I call it shaking up your snow globe. Do it. I double-dog dare you. :-)
