Monday, August 9, 2010

Little Conquests

It's been a battle to keep my head above water some days and I was really having a tough time with some things last week when I saw something completely random that got my mind to wandering. My church is on a busy road that runs east-west through Springfield and into Eugene, along it there are 4 different school zones, so naturally the amount of kid traffic on the road is... entertaining at times.

I was driving to church the other morning and there were 3 kids sitting at Page Elementary School. This isn't at all strange, in fact there was nothing strange about what they were doing at all. They were just sitting there, on top of the newspaper recycle box.

First glance, they were out of the ordinary, just sitting, but I looked again and noticed that they were all very young, about 5 or 6. They had bikes strewn around the bottom of the box, which stood about a foot taller than the tallest of them, and they were sitting on top, just talking. What an accomplishment that had to have been for all of them to be on top. They had to climb, no, they had to conquer that box, and they did.

I began to remember some of the many things that I had to conquer in my youth. I still remember the sense of achievement that went with each one of them, but think about what it was that my friends and I did, and it's not impressive in the least. Spelunking in the storm drains near Costco, climbing a hill that is all of 10 feet high, swinging on a rope out over my grandpa's pond and not getting wet, they don't strike me now as any major undertaking, but then, I was Sir Edmond Hilary, Neil Armstrong, and Marco Polo all rolled into one.

Fast forward to me still sitting in my car out in front of my church. I couldn't remember the last time that I felt accomplished the way a simple thing in my youth could bring out the inner explorer within me. I decided that I need to discover something new, explore the unknown. I need to conquer something again.

No comments:

Post a Comment