Sometimes the simplest of adventures are the best kind.
Take Kai for example. You’d think he’d get a kick out of complicated and expensive field trips. But in actuality, a simple trip to Target would suffice for him. When everything in the world is new, mysterious, and an adventure awaiting him, life is just great.
Or even, wandering the aisles of Home Depot is the equivalent of Disneyland for a 17-month old. Touching physical buttons while there, and touching our buttons (metaphorically speaking), as well.
For adults, sometimes I wonder if the Amish got the idea of “a simple life” right, and everyone else in modern day society is doing it all wrong.
Take social media for example. It’s pretty obvious now that the algorithms have been manipulated in a way that just induces rage bait in everyone while simultaneously making tech companies rich in the process. While they get rich, we all continue to remain divided over… Politics… Lindsay Clancy… the Cornell 7…. Even something as trivial as Kelly Clarkson’s visit to a store in New York somehow indulged anger on both sides (if you look at her Instagram page or even ArtofPlay’s, you’ll see angry comments from both directions). I miss the early days of social media or even the Internet, when we all shared positive updates from one another and that was all it was. Until it wasn’t. The internet was meant to revolutionize the world and could have in a lot of ways, but ended up getting co-opted by the same power structures that consume everything else.
Kai’s life remains simple. As long as he is well fed, and gets to play (his primary profession), his life is going well. As parents, we will do our best to shield him from the dark realities of the world we live in, while also seeking to grasp simple moments of joy wherever we can find them.
