Have you ever looked out the window at the day and been struck by its incredible and perfect beauty? Whether the perfect shade of blue of the sky overhead that your eyes can capture in the limited view of the window or the sight of a small bird, maybe a robin, maybe a towhee, maybe a white-throated sparrow scuffing about under the branches of the small flowering shrub that’s in line with the window’s sill. I treasure those small moments of joy. Some days I even covet them. And I am absolutely a believer in the idea that what we look for we tend to find. In fact, that idea is partly why I started this habit of love series to begin with—what we look for in the world and in the people around us, we will find more and more.
This is one of those concepts I believe we get to model for our children as they grow from childhood to tweens to teens. It is, I believe, an idea that is better caught than taught. Ever since our girls were young, my husband and I have pointed out small glimpses of beauty to them, a hawk in the sky, a bird at one of the feeders, the blooming of a wild rose in the woods of our rental home, a dandelion puff waiting for someone to make a wish. We have also celebrated small joys with them as well, teaching them to find small moments of delight in the world around them.
As they’ve grown into teenagers, I enjoy watching them as they, too, embrace the small things that provide a reason to smile and even cause them to giggle or outright laugh. The other day they opened the small Valentine’s Day gifts their Nana had sent them from Florida and each expressed a burst of delight at the small gift my mom had tucked into the box for each of them—for the 16 year old, a small dragon figure and for the 14 year old a Hot Wheels car that was actually Snoopy driving his doghouse like a race car. Similarly, we have celebrated the shared joy of the small angler fish who made her way from the deep dark of the ocean depths to the surface seemingly to bask in the sunlight before she died.
Celebrating big moments like Christmas or birthdays is always fun and I love a big celebration as much as anyone. But I am someone who truly loves to seek out the small, the ordinary, the less obvious aspects of daily life and relish those equally as much if not more than the holidays and obvious milestones. I am the sort of person you will find ensconced in the corner of a room at a party engaged in a deep and soul-stirring conversation rather than the person moving through the room making smalltalk with person after person. I like the depth of real life and the joy of small moments we experience in the course of an ordinary day. Moments like when you hear your favorite song on your shuffled playlist, when you spot a cloud shaped like a dragon, when you come across an incredibly beautiful image in the story you’re reading, when your teenager gives you a random, unexpected hug.
The world can look a lot different to us when we look at it with the eyes of our hearts and I sincerely believe that’s what this way of looking at the world provides us—a different perspective. But we have to work at it. We have to practice it and also invite our teenagers to try it, sharing with them the beauty and goodness we notice in the world. When we create space in our days, in our lives, to pause and to simply be, we give ourselves the gift of small joys. In stillness we open ourselves up to the divine and the sublime. Truly, it is more readily available to us than we think. To start, we can take a moment to step back from the chores and the To Dos and observe the people and the world around us, especially our teenagers. What we seek, what we look for, we will find more of in our lives—and in our teenagers. And that is one of my greatest joys each day.