As I was looking through the pictures that I just uploaded
from our camera onto our computer, I could not resist sharing three that I had
forgotten that I’d even taken last week:
Look at Nina’s feet in this one. Do you know what she is doing?
She’s testing out
Duplo roller skates, which she conceptualized and built all on her own.
Jack then took Nina’s
model as inspiration and tweaked her ideas into something designed for a
completely different purpose – a jump toy.
With pride, he moved his self-created toy about the living room and
tried leaping over and around it at different angles.
Both children initiated their own learning. They immersed themselves in inventiveness and
purposeful activity, and then called out to Mike and me with glee to come and see
what they had created.
Wow.
Their ingenuity makes
me pause to recognize an eternal truth – humans are made to create. It is natural and instinctive for us to do
so. Our Creator has endowed each of us
with an amazing sense of resourcefulness and imagination.
In our family, the fruit of that gift is often best enjoyed
in a screen-free environment. I have
written before about how media
and our eldest boy’s mind don’t mix (or mix too well, depending on how you
look at it), how we have become a relatively tv-free family, and, consequently,
how we sometimes spend evenings when other typical families might be watching
television doing things like magnet
painting and playing
impromptu self-made family games. What
I have not shared is what we do on most of our “free” evenings. That is, let the kids create.
Drawing. Designing.
Imaginary play. Forts. Playdough models. Parades.
Mock political rallies. You name
it, our kids create it. And, I love
it!
Daily, I am impressed with the ingenuity that all three of Mike
and my children evidence. Moreover, I am
amazed with how freely they move between what is and what could be. With the heart, eyes and hands of childhood
they care not for where imagination ends and reality begins. Rather, they let imagination guide their inventiveness. And, oh the things they invent.
As I reflect upon Duplo skates and jumping toys, I give
thanks for the circumstances that led Mike and I to choose to be a mostly
TV-free home and the inventiveness which we have witnessed as a result.
At the same time, I wonder when I lost the ability to move
as easily as my children from conceptualization to creation. What is that hampers me – and so many other
adults – from consistently using the gifts that we have been given? How can free ourselves from habits that confine
our vision and impede the realization of what could be? Is
there a lesson that our children can teach us about how exercise our creativity
daily?
I think so, and I am open to learning.
