Just Write {31}

My early riser is up with the light. Bouncing around and all chatter and energy. He passes the hours (yes, hours) before school with Nutella and checking in on the baby chicks (yes, chicks) and Legos and Animal Planet. Today we learned about walruses. Walruses apparently get annoyed with each other and jab those big tusks into each other. The narrator man says that’s okay because they heal fast and they’re made of six layers of blubber.

On a commercial break, there’s an ad with a woman in a hospital bed. She says she had a stroke because she smoked her whole life. Her son is giving her a sponge bath and she’s talking about how she can’t do anything anymore. She tells smokers to “enjoy your independence now”.

I asked Miles what he thought all of that meant and he said that everyone should stop smoking. Then he added that if you don’t stop smoking, you can’t do anything for yourself anymore.

You need help with everything. Even eating breakfast…or planting a tree.

What amazed me about that was that he was more concerned about not being able to do bigger things even though the lady in the bed was pointing out that she can’t even go to the bathroom on her own. A six year old boy wants to be able to plant a tree and so he says he’ll never smoke. Of course, I thought. The bigger things are what make you feel more fully alive. Who cares about baths and bathroom time when you’re six. Miles knows a lot. We’re not like walruses. We inflict the pain on ourselves a lot of the time and we don’t heal as easily, our layers are less, I suppose.

He’s right. It would be really hard to not be able to plant a tree.

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This is the 31st installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. Then please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?

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