Thank-full: Day 3

Life as a grown-up can be lived as an endless fascination, but it can also be lived as a monotonous drain of energy.  The first, belies intention, while the latter, laziness or helplessness or discouragement or, the list goes on.  At some point on my trajectory toward adulthood, I knew I didn't want to be one of "those" adults.  The ones who never have the energy to do fun things, who lose their curiosity, who are too uptight to get dirty and forget how to play, or are simply too sophisticated to engage in such childish behavior.  And it's not always a conscious choice.  Life can knock the childlike right out of us, too.  This is when we must resist the most, though, for there's a mystery in childlikeness that it seems we must hold onto on our journey through adulthood.  It's one of the few tangible ways I know how to see the joy in everyday life.  


It's not easy to find friends who are similarly minded, who are still in touch with this innocent part of them.  


But last night, I jumped on floors made of trampoline, bounced off trampoline walls, participated in a game of trampoline dodgeball, and practiced flips and belly flops off trampolines into a pit of foam, with three other women for a dear friend's 29th birthday.  All three of them are moms.  One of them is in her mid thirties and the other is forty, but you wouldn't know by the way they bounced and played.  They could even do back handsprings.  At the end of our trampoline play, we each put quarters into a machine that dispensed fake mustaches, then spent twenty minutes squeezed into a photo booth posing for pictures and trying to keep our mustaches in place.  

I fill up with thanks today for time spent with grown ups who haven't forgotten how to play.