“Well, actually…”  When I hear my son, Cole, start a sentence this way, I know I’m in for a lecture.  “Money does technically grow on trees, Ma.”

I thought once he had to earn the money toward his Xbox games, that would be the end of the Xbox for him, but he assiduously socked away his allowance each week, and then we’d make the pilgrimage every so often to his Mecca, GameStop, to purchase his next video fix.

Being inert is kind of an art.  That’s the lesson I got from my son’s summer.  All the things he loved surrounded him in his room, from his Xbox to his dog to his friends.  He made the best of it when I said we wouldn’t be going on vacation this year, let’s consider this summer a stay-cation.  So he did.  Stay-put-cation is more like it!  I had to invent a rule that anytime one of his friends came over, they all had to take the dog out into the yard every hour, on the hour, just so they’d ever see the outdoors and feel the sun on their skin.

We spend so much of our lives on the clock for someone else that when we’re finally home, we convert it into a cave.  It’s possible now to do everything from home - work, shop, even order gourmet meals.   People who “spelunk” explore caves, and it becomes kind of a way of life for them as well.  What is it we love about nesting?

Maybe if there was a way to make work more enjoyable for people, they wouldn’t dread Monday, and their bodies wouldn’t speak for them by getting sick all the time so they had to – oh darn! – miss work.

Why isn’t there a course offered in grade school about how to find your forté?  I think there should be an inner guidance counselor to teach kids to listen to their own innate wisdom.  To blaze their own trail, find their own tribe.  I think the alpha and omega of an education is to learn critical thinking.  Once you know what you know, you can adjust it as you go along.  Everything we learn has been taught to us by someone in a position of authority, and “conventional wisdom” changes all the time.  Who’s to say what’s true on a tilted, spinning orb held up by forces known variously as gravity and God?  Isn’t it possible that we may actually contain all the answers inside us?

So we spend all of our lives in caves of different dimensions.  First, we’re in a crib, then a classroom, then a cubicle, and ultimately, a coffin.  What if we set our minds to it and designed our own lives according to what lights us up from the inside?  Would the world stop spinning tomorrow?  Not if the forces I know on a first name basis have any say in the matter.  Heavens, no!

In my mind, it's all settled.
I'm surrounded by the ones I love
and the things that tickle me: my hazelnut candle.
Castanets. A turquoise feather boa.
This might seem frivolous, but these little tchotchkes
make me feel at home wherever I am.
It doesn't matter where we put down roots
just as long as our branches reach toward the sun.
Be with us as we roam and ramble
then bring us back to the things that matter.
Help us to bloom where we're planted and fly free in our minds.
Most of all, set up a home in our hearts.

-Ruth Williams