Behind her is a hall filled with dinosaur skeletons- some of which ran the entire length of the room. As I walked in, “it’s almost hard to believe that these were real,” spilled from my mouth. The enormous size of the creatures is a bit startling, truly wondrous, and so very curious.
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All day she was excited to see the dinos, but when we got to the exhibit, she didn’t get it. The bones certainly didn’t look like the dinosaurs in her books or like her uncle’s dinosaur figurines, which she’d recently discovered. Given a choice between the dinosaur remains and the view outside, the garden looked much more enticing.
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And I guess I could write something about how often I miss what I’ve been looking for because when I get to it, it doesn’t “look” anything like what I was expecting. [Very true].
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But I think instead, in this moment, the lesson was more along the lines of remembering that sometimes it’s more important (and far more exciting) to explore the ordinary that is right in front of us, than to spend too much time gazing at the past.
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The past must inform our present and our future, of course. And standing in the presence of ancient colossal beasts and marveling at the Creator’s work is important, too. But also important? The sun, and the trees in the garden, and the people living and breathing right alongside us. The ordinary really isn’t so ordinary if we just remember to stop and gaze at it. #lessonsfromthelittleones
