Some weeks weighs us down. In more ways than other weeks do. The days feel longer. The nights feel heavier. These are the weeks when our thoughts are not linear. They are only circular. Around and around they go weaving through questions and doubts. On weeks like these you need to find a way out.
Sometimes the best people to be around are the people you don’t need to share too many words with for them to understand. Because they just know you and they get what is going on. The connection is effortless and the connection lifts the weight.
A Saturday morning coffee in a suburban coffee shop is how I ended just one of those weeks, with my sister and AJ. There was no talk of life twisting issues or drama. We spoke about Minecraft and Lord of the Rings, drank coffee and ate cake. We traded our worries for silly. Silly moments and memories made on a glum Melbourne winter’s day.
The weight not only lifted. I forgot the weight of the week. In its place the gentle reminder of the things that matter, the things that make my heart melt. There are my memories from that morning.
The one thing you forget the moment you become an adult is the perspective you had as a child. It is a shame really. On some days I think a child’s perspective would serve us so much better in this fractured adult world.
You forget that even the smallest of things seem bigger and the simplest of things stand out to curious little eyes. Even your average, nothing fancy, stock cupboard seems so looming and tall to little eyes.
Perhaps what warms my heart the most when I am with my boys is the shift in spirit that happens when I am around them. On this morning it was only AJ and his babble of Minecraft and obsession with Frodo, but it was enough to melt the ice. Melt away the hardened knots of a heavy week that I was holding onto.
What’s more, it was not only a shift away from the week, it was a complete abandon. Maybe the guard goes down. Maybe it was a reminder that the things that matter most do not weigh us down. They lift our spirits and give us reason. These are the memories captured by AJ from that morning.
We often joke that when God created us both, he shook up all the ingredients and split them equally in two. One half is her and the other half is me. No two ingredients are shared, just split. And that is what makes our relationship work.
AJ adores her. She is his best aunty, best godmother, best friend, best solver of life’s complex questions, especially if they relate to Lego and after this particular morning, Minecraft. She has patience for him that I rarely see for anyone else.
Watching them together I not only forget my worries. They dissolve into irrelevant. Her perspective on life, on the moment, on what I am wearing is everything I need sometimes to get my own perspective back. My much needed call back to baseline.
She gets it. She doesn’t over analyse it. She helps me straighten it out. And if all else fails, she is there to sit with me and just be right there in it. Till the worries pass and wash over. These are the memories captured by my sister that morning.
Sometimes we wait for the perfect moment to capture our memories. Make them steadfast in a digital world of infinity. Yet, even when life is not picture perfect, it is more perfect than we ever imagined it could be. And these are the memories worth holding onto forever.
Memory is part of the My Family Lens blog challenge series held through Olympus and Kidspot Voices of 2014. #myfamilylens explores and celebrates the unique things that make us the family that we are.
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