Perspective
It's always a choice
As I was walking across the living room this morning I looked at the coffee table and was gearing up to yell at Squirt to clean his shit up. It’s a never-ending battle ‘cause this table in the living room is, well, where we live. It is never clean. But then my perspective shifted. Spouse and I are frequently explaining to Squirt that your perspective is a choice. You can focus on the good or the bad...but your focus is your choice. What sprang into my head was just how much living there is in this picture. So I took a quick picture as we continued to prepare for the day and now before it all leaves my head...
The wooden puzzle is something my Grandpa made me that Squirt loves. Underneath it is a paper where he was trying to write an algorithm to determine the minimum number of moves to solve it. I had no fuckin’ clue how to do that so he was just winging it.
South of that is an archery equipment catalog. His Grandpa and Uncle and Aunt gave him early birthday money so he could buy himself a recurve bow and it was delivered yesterday. He’s very excited.
North-East of that is a glowstick because who doesn’t love glowsticks. I’m reminded of one he broke across his face a couple months ago and he got really worried it was going to make him sick. Truth was I was a little worried too.
East of the glowstick is a little container of Nintendo Amiibo cards which we use while we’re playing Zelda. We’re both working through Tears of the Kingdom on our own accounts and comparing notes.
East of that is a Captain Underpants book. His go to humor comic book. We’ve slowly built up the entire collection with visits to our used bookstore and he’s eaten all my trade-in credit doing it.
North of that is The Captain (The Last Horizon Book 1). You can’t really see the guy with a red tunic, a wand, a blaster, and a blue cloak on the cover but Spouse is, right now, trying to decipher a fabric pattern to make a costume of that character for Halloween.
Underneath The Captain is On The Edge by Nate Silver who writes The Silver Bulletin. It’s a fascinating nonfiction book that deals with gambling all the way from slots and professional poker up to the venture capital world in Silicon Valley.
On top of “The Captain” is a piece of paper, he was doing some sort of sculpture thing, I dunno
North of that stack is another stack of books and on top is “Everything You Need to Ace Math In One Big Fat Notebook” which I found at the new Goodwill used book store for him He’s read through it a couple times and it’s a staple on the coffee table.
North of that is “Everything You Need to Ace Computer Science and Coding in One Big Fat Notebook” which came from the same place. He’s reviewing that one with his nightly reading right now with his mom. I’ve leafed through it once or twice too.
East of that is a thumbdrive from my old job. Because that’s the only way my kid can get images off the internet and on to his school computer which was vitally important for his current presentation. He took pictures off the internet of the Cradle series book spines and the Bobiverse book spines.
North of that is the graphic novel version of The Warriors - which is about anthropomorphized cats. We’ve read the first book a couple years ago and we negotiated the purchase of this graphic novel adaptation at Barnes & Noble last weekend where he paid for half, including blowing his week’s allowance, and I covered the rest.
Last is the globe which, I realize now, would have been the easiest thing to start with for anyone trying to following along with this but oh well. The globe is out because he was locating Israel on the map. He was astounded at how small the country is considering how much we’ve been hearing and talking about it for the last couple years. Those have been hard conversations as we discuss the importance of not hating either side of the conflict. At various times he’s hated everyone involved and I think that’s a not-bad place to be rather than picking a side and twisting one’s worldview to ignore the darkness of the side you’re giving full-throated support to.
Anyways. The coffee table is messy. But the mess is because we’re living a life together as a family. So this morning, rather than see the mess, I chose to see that it’s a life well lived that connects my family in all sorts of ways as soon as I took a minute to think about it.
Squirt Says…
Finally you think about it and realize that random stuff isn’t trash. It isn’t worthless. Today, we found a VCR at goodwill for $ 4 they can go for $ 20 to $ 200. Dad wouldn’t let me get it; he said it was junk ,and that nobody would buy it. There are over 10,000 listings for a VCR on Ebay, and clearly a market for them.
Dad Responds…
Yes, Dad was wrong. But not wrong enough to drive back to the Goodwill 30 minutes down the road just so Squirt can start selling shit on Ebay. He can sweep the house as an extra chore if he wants more money.