January 10: Being With It

Today: Be with it.

Today was Family Fun Day, a day trying to enjoy time together, find fun things to play, adventures to have..just family.

I decided to take time throughout our travels today to "be with it." Wherever I was with my family, whatever we were doing, to really be with it wholly and completely. It is hard sometimes, no matter how fun thigs can be, to stay completely with an activity when it's a Sunday or you have a stack of paperwork somewhere calling your name. I put it all aside, I placed it in a small wooden vessel and set it adrift. I wanted to be with it (my family) and be without it (everything else).

I practiced my haikus, written in spilled milk from breakfast and embraced yogurt spattered across the hardwood floor as a means to sculpt gentle chrysanthemums along the poems' borders. As children trampolined across my abdomen and we bowled into the evening hours screaming and cheering for each others' duckpins I found a gentle recognition that we had spent the whole day in one another's company figuring out our lives in humorous, mysterious and wonderful ways and we were with it throughout. I will give myself a purple belt in "With-it-ness" for today, third degree. I did well, but as all Dads know, we always feel some attachment to making things better, doing more. I don't know why that is, except to say it has been embedded in us through our culture, but that drive exists. I have been able to put it away sometimes and sometimes it wins out and puts me in a crippling anklelock, but I eventually escape, humbled.

So Monday comes and with it new lessons, new understandings.
Bow to your victories and mistakes for today.
Bow to the love of your family.
Bow to life.

Zen Daddy