These pictures were taken exactly 9 years ago (3/19 and 3/13 respectively). Since it feels like only an hour or so has passed since then, I am feeling pretty panicky about how fast it’s all going. This week is Grace and Whit’s spring break and I’m going to try to spend it entirely immersed in our messy and wonderful life. This is the first week I have taken off from this blog since starting it in September 2006 – I hope you’ll come back, when I do, next Monday!
This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.
~ Terry Tempest Williams
I love Terry Tempest Williams but read this beautiful passage for the first time on the beautiful blog First Sip.
I have often discussed the dissonance that comes from staring 40 in the face while still feeling like I’m 18. Or maybe 21.
But now and then I am reminded that I can’t be that young anymore, mostly when I realize that Grace and Whit really are growing up in a hugely different world than the one in which I did. I love those lists of things that children of the 70s can relate to, and they always make me laugh.
Grace and Whit, though, are children of the 21st century. Herewith, eleven ways my children are growing up in a world different than that in which I was a child:
1. They love – in fact, prefer – to talk on the phone on speaker. This segues nicely into being very comfortable with FaceTiming. I had a conversation recently with the ear of someone in their 60s over FaceTime because they assumed that you hold a phone to your ear. I’m somewhere in between these two poles. We’ve come a long way from the phone on the kitchen wall with the long twisty cord.
2. They don’t think a device needs charging until it is actually dead. I start looking around frantically for a plug when I’m at about 70%.
3. Their passion for YouTube knows no bounds. It is almost always the first stop in trying to find anything – music OR video – online.
4. They love scented things. This may not be generational, but in our house it is. Grace walks around billowing clouds of Wonderstruck by Taylor Swift. Me? Unscented. Less glamour, sure, but also less choking.
5. Carseats are so integral a part of life in America that cars come with built-in tethers for them. In our day? Floating around the “way back” (untethered to anything) was my favorite way to travel.
6. They have never known a world when TV shows were on certain times, on certain days. Friday night was when Dallas was on, and you had better be there at 8:00 to watch it, or else you were taking a big risk if you tried to program your VCR. They want to watch something? They just click to it. Incredible. And VCR? They have no idea what that is. They don’t even know what “to Tivo something” means.
7. They wouldn’t know what a mimeograph machine is if it hit them in the head. The smell of those purply-blue print pages, however, takes me back to grade school faster than almost anything else. Grace and Whit log onto the class Google Drive to check their homework assignment. I flipped through the mimeographed pages in my Trapper Keeper.
8. Their ability to suspend disbelief is pretty weak. I see this when we watch old movies – notably, lately, The Princess Bride. “Those are not real,” Grace scoffed when the rodents of unusual size scurried across the screen. I blame the extremely lifelike special effects in movies today.
9. Photography is an unlimited exercise for them: we were recently discussing buying a disposable underwater camera, and Whit asked whether we bought memory cards for it. No, I explained, you had 27 exposures, and that was it. Both Grace and Whit were frankly aghast at the idea of paying per photograph, of pictures only in hard copy, of having to wait overnight to have your film developed. In fact, at the word “film” at all. Totally foreign. I like digital photography myself, an awful lot, but I do think that we have lost some discernment and care now that a camera roll is unlimited.
10. They don’t know a single phone number. For that matter, neither do I. Whereas I can still remember the (home) numbers of my childhood home as well as a few close friends. Those were the numbers I punched into that kitchen phone with the twisty cord. Grace and Whit don’t have to remember anything since it’s all programmed.
11. They don’t know how to read a map. My father always told me that one of the most essential life skills was ability to read a map while traveling. Now, my aforementioned carsickness often got in the way here, but I do know how to read a map and often joke that I’m one of the last remaining people who prints out maps before going somewhere. Grace and Whit just assume a destination will be punched into a GPS and we’ll be guided there.
Are you a child of the 70s? Are you parenting a child of the 21st century? What differences do you note in growing up now vs. growing up then?
Yesterday, we went to Walden. As you know if you’ve been reading for any length of time, this is a very special place for Grace, Whit, and me, and we like to go year-round. Every summer we have a morning swim there, and we also like to go in the fall, winter or spring, to walk around the often-deserted pond. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for us (and, I know, for millions of others), Walden is holy.
We woke up to an empty Sunday. What a divine privilege these wide-open days are. I know that now that I can sense their running through the hourglass of years. We had a quick breakfast, Whit was whining, Grace was annoyed at something, Matt was reluctant, but I kept us moving and all four of us headed west.
The path was iced-over and slippery when we took off around the pond. Grace and Whit scampered ahead, knowing their way around now, exploring up and down the snowy hillsides that arc away from the pond. 
The beach was snowy and the pond was frozen completely solid. We arrived at the site of Thoreau’s house, where the pile of rocks, usually studded with cairns, was covered with snow. I read the famous lines that I know by heart under my breath, watching my children climbing on the pile of snow marking where the writer had lived, feeling the familiar sense of tightness in my chest and hot tears in my eyes. Yes, this: to live deliberately. This: to learn what life has to teach.
So many of those lessons are to be found in the achingly blue sky, the brilliant white snow, the tangible peace in the air, the evocative lines of poetry. There are so many lessons about life right here in nature, and I recalled again how powerful it is to simply be in the world, to look and listen and breathe, a lesson I keep learning over and over again.
By the time we’d circled the pond and come back to where we started we all had pink cheeks and calmer hearts. As it always does, Walden had worked its particular, mysterious magic on all four of us. The poetry and the blue sky had soaked through our pores, through our spirits, and we were reminded of what it is to live this life.
And I lagged behind my family, watching them walk away, standing on the frozen beach and gazing at that unbelievable, outrageous blue. This beautiful world.
Make the Ordinary Come Alive
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is a way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples, and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
– William Martin
(thank you to my friend Katie for introducing me to this beautiful passage!)