Despite inconvenience
More fun, surprising, fulfilling, rewarding, and memorable experiences await us.
The older I've become, the more I've started to make decisions based on convenience. Based on a hunch and a recent experience, I think it may be time to reconsider that as my default approach.
The other day, our 8 m/o daughter, Charlotte, found our poodle Brownie's water bowl. She crawled with excitement to the bowl and proceeded to promptly spill water all over the floor. Still navigating the world horizontally, her top and pants quickly got drenched.
The thing is, we saw it coming. We saw her coming. Yet, for some reason, we held ourselves back from picking her up and putting her elsewhere and keeping Brownie's water bowl out of her reach. I don't know what it was... maybe we were both just tired of the inevitability of her eventually getting to that bowl so we put on our nihilistic caps. Perhaps.
But the reason isn't as important as the effect that the outcome has had. It made me realise just how weird I found my behaviour to be. What were you thinking? You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble cleaning up if you had just temporarily moved the bowl away from her reach!
That would have been the convenient thing to do, and the normal (sane?) me would have undoubtedly done that!
But here's the good news that I've been working this preamble to get to - Charlotte loved playing in the small puddle that she had curiously created for herself…
First, when the water spilt, she looked at me, wondering if what she did was okay. When I smiled instead of showing frustration, I think she read it as "go ahead, have fun with the water!" because that's exactly what she did next. She started doing the frog-style on the floor, hands splashing the water that lay spilt in front of her. Big smiles for minutes straight. I grabbed my phone and took pictures and videos, of course.
What was most surprising to me was that minutes later, my wife went to fill a bucket with water, threw in a few of Charlotte's plastic toys, and put that in front of her.