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Small Moments
Learning to Slow Down and Observe Your World By George Ayres
c="http://www.graphics.iparenting.com/clipart/parenting/00014233.JPG" height=285 width=190 align=left>"Wow. Look at that. It's pretty, isn't it?" I asked.
"Yeah. It's pretty. I want to touch it."
"Let's just watch it for a minute. Let's see what the spider does."
"She's waiting in her house," Miranda said.
We waited and watched. The spider was motionless for a while, but then it scurried to the other side, perhaps thinking something had flown into its trap.
I've learned many things from my four daughters, but one of the most important – and probably the one I pay the least amount of attention to – is slowing down and looking at the world through their eyes. They don't pointedly teach us parents something as obvious as that. When children observe the world around them, they are only doing what comes naturally to them. They notice the tiniest, sometimes most insignificant things that we wouldn't see if it weren't for them pointing things out to us.
In our busy and often frantic adult worlds, we run from here to there, errand to errand, task after task. We hurry to get the latest project finished, arrive on time for that meeting. We wish that traffic light would change to green just a little faster. We're on the go and don't always notice the simple things that are right in front of us. And why should we? We've got things to do, children to ferry from place to place, school lunches to make, baths to start. We're busy people.
But with all that busyness swirling around us, it's refreshing to be reminded of that roly-poly looking for his mommy or that spider waiting in her house. And while those things may be small, our c
