Beyond FRIDAY: Scouting for...Peace of Mind

This morning was breezy, around sixty degrees. I parked the car to walk my two girls to the front door of school since their brother wasn’t with us to help at car line and since my older daughter was carrying a new globe in for show and tell. My kindergartner had her silver cat necklace for show and tell tucked safely in her Hello Kitty backpack. As we walked up the sidewalk along the east side of the school, I held my little one’s hand, realized she was humming, and willed myself not to talk. Instead, I watched my second-grader with the globe in her proud hands and her pink coat and Disney backpack, felt the rose-petal hand I held, and really listened to my little one humming. She reminded me of my son humming at her age while skiing. The world in such moments is so comforting. A blue sky, a happy child or two, contentment captured, if only for a few moments. And on the walk back to the car alone after kissing my girls good-bye, I reached in my pocket and found a tiny white seashell speckled brown like a bird’s egg, fragile and so far from the sea. I’d no idea how it got in my pocket, but accepted it as a token of consciousness, a reminder that what’s most important is also most temporary, a talisman of awareness that despite the world’s many disturbing, desperate crises, personal glimmers of peace remain within reach.