Tag: time

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Making Magic

Reading with a child is a gesture of love. It is a tangible gift of time, our most precious resource. Reading can stop the noise and fury of everything else that surrounds us in that moment. It creates a space for questions and conversations, observations and laughter, a means to model gestures of kindness and creation and exploration and how to get through hard stuff.

We love picture books for so many reasons, but their ability to make us laugh, to help us cry, and ultimately to allow us see each other and ourselves a bit more clearly are my favorites.

It is critical to our collective survival to protect the creative space of picture books and children’s literature, to protect the magic of what happens when we read with children and when we help them start the journey of literacy. Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic, but I assure you it is not.   

Picture books, children’s books, are vehicles for a multitude of life skills. Of course, this includes literacy and critical thinking. But alongside that, the experience of being read to taps into social and emotional learning cues that children will carry throughout their lives. And what stories are available to read, to hear, to hold need to include everyone’s story, not just those that reflect our own.

Today is National Children’s Picture Book Day, part of the larger IBBY-sponsored International Children’s Book Day. I hope you can take a few moments this weekend to read to a child in your life or to yourself if you have a chance to revisit a favorite book (or find a new favorite). It is also a great reminder to support your local libraries. Shop independent bookstores. Champion teachers who are working to broaden classroom collections for readers.

Read together. Make magic.

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We Are All Struggling

Bottom view of winter snowy trees in the blue sky. Frosty branches with hoarfrost twigs in a sunny day.

At least, that is what Twitter tells me. Instagram tells me that we are in this together and with enough inspirational quotes, we’ll get by. And Pinterest offers a multitude of ways in which to craft, project, pinboard, or otherwise organize our way through these times. (I don’t know what Facebook would tell me to do, as I avoid it like the… oh.)

Social media is a dangerous place to get a sense of the collective conscious. Of course, this has always been true, even before mass messages were sent through satellite connections.

But. People are struggling. It is winter in half the world, after all. And it is January everywhere, which comes with expectations to do better. On top of a medical pandemic, we are also awash in a pandemic of attempted authoritarianism driven by greed and fear. Societies are divided. People have died, have become disabled, have lost loved ones, or have lost touch with each other. Many feel as if they have lost touch with themselves. And kids sense and see all of this.

I haven’t written much about our collective struggle; it has been covered ad nauseum. I have not found much useful solace among the shrill pieces of complaint or reflection or advice or finger pointing. The cynicism becomes tiring. The advice feels hollow.

Increasingly, as I seek ways to motivate our family through a space that has seemingly lost all points of reference, I find myself turning to things untouched by our self-inflicted state of messy human existence. Yesterday morning, the nearly full moon was still up and brilliantly shining across a subzero walk. The moon carries on.

On Monday, a Cooper’s hawk silently watched us as we cross-country skied our way around the small lakes.

Last week, I spied a red fox slipping cautiously and gracefully through the woods behind our home. Nature carries on.

The days are slowly getting brighter again.

It is nearly February.

Time carries on. Even when we feel we’ve lost touch with it.

I do not have advice for you, reader. Only empathy and patience, and the sharing of what I’m doing right now. I ask myself on the long days: Have you hugged the kids? Are you hungry? Tired? Cold? What is one small thing you can do right now that brings a sense of comfort or accomplishment or rest?

I am so grateful to be doing this work, to be publishing books like The Struggle Bus (a timely read for us all), and simply to be here. Every day, I remind myself: this is enough.

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Vanishing Time

As I reflect on what happens during transitions, and what the start of fall and school and life changes means to the relativity of time, September is the month that disappears.

I’ve written before about time. But one thing that’s always fascinated me is how quickly time goes the closer we get to the end of something: the end of a ballgame, the end of the year, the end of life. Vanishing time makes things exciting or exhausting, sad or hard. As humans, we often feel there is never enough time. The effect of its relativity can also make it more challenging to stay present in the moment as we think about everything that seemingly needs to be done.

Generally, children are immune to that feeling. Days are longer. Years are longer. Wild imaginations and active play create the beautiful magic of suspended time. Reality pauses while they are immersed in those states. Being present is an aspect of a growth mindset, which makes a lot of sense when you think about children and how much and how quickly they are learning and growing as they are fully absorbed in something.

As adults, we sometimes refer to capturing that feeling as “flow.” We aren’t watching the clock or dreading the clock. We become unaware of it altogether. Capturing flow doesn’t pause anything. That time still vanishes. But playing or daydreaming or diving into something we love to do is how we would hope to spend the time we have here.

As I look to October and the rest of the year, I’m reminding myself of this: my time is not guaranteed just because time exists on a calendar. If I want to suspend the moment, I need to be present in that moment.

As you possibly look for your own ways to slow down the time-space continuum, I hope this simple reminder helps. Being *here* rather than thinking about what needs to be done when you get to an unpromised *there* makes both moments (here and there) more fulfilling.

You cannot fill up a moment in which you’re not fully present.