Purple Elmo's

I love watching Ella color. I love the non-conformity with which she scribbles. Lines? Who cares about staying in the lines? Who cares if she colors Elmo black, then red, then a couple of shades of purple and gives him a blue nose. Sometimes, i just want to crawl inside her head and see what she's thinking- just watch the wheels turn. (But, really, I'd only like to do this while she's between the ages of 1 and 5. After that- and especially when she heads into puberty- I think I'd rather not be inside her head. Might be a bit too much for me to handle).

Back to my little artist. I love that she loves to simply create, and the cool thing is that her imagination is turned on by what I would probably consider the dullest things imaginable. The other day, she spent an hour playing with some little glass votives (supervised playing, of course ;-) ). I sat on the floor with her and watched her as she picked them up, carried them to the table, set them down, randomly put cheerios in them, then picked them back up and carried them back over to the windowsill....and so on. For an hour. She had a blast. As I watched her, I found myself wondering what happens to us as we get older, that we stop being captivated by everyday things. For the record, I'm not advocating that we should all stand and gape open-mouthed at some kind of glass votive centerpiece (though I've been guilty of doing this with similar objects while shopping in Crate and Barrel. But that's beside the point). It just seems that over time, we tend to lose our curiosity about the little things. Even the big things.

At some point, we stop thinking outside the lines in the coloring book. Maybe it's because one day, someone tells us that we need to color Elmo red- because he's always been red and he'll always be red. It's no longer acceptable to make a purple Elmo. So we say, "okay," but we move on to our next project with just a shred more trepidation and insecurity. And this is just the beginning of a chain of events that cause us to become increasingly aware that it's not actually okay to branch out anymore- that "different" isn't so good after all. By the time we hit our teenage years, we're dropping money (if we're really lucky, it's our parents') in an effort to keep from standing out at all. We need to do, wear, and buy what everyone else is doing, wearing and buying. By the time we reach college, we decide on majors and minors and a small percentage will end up with a career in something that truly re-creates and energizes them. The rest fall into the trap that because we're truly good at "X", we need to put all of our eggs into one basket and pursue "X," even if it isn't life-giving. Even if it's, in fact, soul-sucking.

I grew up surrounded by music. I say it was my first love, because it truly was. But here's the thing about first loves- they're the exception rather than the rule, aren't they? They tend to stick with us better in our memory than they often do in our reality. After 25 years of lessons, recitals, gigs, a Music Education degree, a few years leading a worship team, a private piano studio, a handful of finished original songs (and many more that are unfinished), it's hard for me to recall a time in my life when music wasn't an integral part of it. But just because it was integral doesn't mean I always wanted it that way. The truth is, I have never totally resolved the feeling that I should be doing music- even if I didn't want to. Even if I was burnt out. It was my "X" and because I was deemed "good at it," the rest, as they say, is history. Even in the last few months, I've grown increasingly frustrated that I'm not churning out more original work and writing new stuff. But no one other than me has placed those expectations on my shoulders. I came to the startling conclusion that I've never allowed myself to let it go for any length of time because I almost felt like I was committing some form of adultery. My first love- how could I let it fall by the wayside while I explore other things? That would just be....wrong....right??

Wrong.

So I've let myself off the hook. And it's been incredibly liberating. Honestly, I don't miss music too much at the moment. Not only that, but I don't feel guilty for not missing it. I know I'll eventually come back to it and it'll be there waiting for me. And when I do decide to pick it up again, I can be sure it will be with a renewed vigor and intensity. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, after all. Until then, I've got this new camera that is completely perplexing to me, but I'm loving figuring out all of the buttons and gadgets and how if I take the picture at this angle and increase the shutter speed or use a different mode, I get this kind of result. Sadly, it's been a long time since I've actually learned something new. Too long. I can blame a fear of failure, in part. I can also blame a guilty conscience, as weird as it was for me to come to that realization. Yet I suspect an even bigger culprit in this was the gradual loss of a childlike curiosity for something new and uncharted. But I've been able to draw inspiration, once again, from my little Bug- who continues to be delighted in coloring pictures of purple Elmo's with blue noses. I hope she never loses her sense of creativity. But just in case she does...I think I'll frame them for future reference. ;-)