What's Your Sand Dollar?
This week I’m being outed by my return guest blogger and daughter, Louise Gray Leonard. As I told a friend this weekend, there's a part of me who could easily have too many cats and rinse zip-lock baggies. It’s highly related to the part that looks for seashells all day given the opportunity.
Our children study us. I knew this given how obsessively I studied my own parents, but I held hope my children would focus on each other versus me. Louise Gray’s observations in this piece aren’t so bad. Still, I know she has less flattering maternal studies where the results aren’t so promising for her world views.
If she ever undertakes a meta-analysis of this research, I hope she concludes life means living our best selves right beside the ones needing some attention and, in my case, the ones too clearly mirroring a crazy spinster aunt on my mother’s side. Happy looking, finding, and holding dear your own sand dollars.
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Louise Gray Leonard, Guest Blogger
What's Your Sand Dollar?
My mom loves finding seashells. Whenever we take our annual trip to the beach with her family, she googles the beach to find out which shells are most common and most rare there.
But what she especially loves to find are sand dollars. She’s only found a few whole ones, but she never seems discouraged when a day or entire trip to the beach doesn’t bring her a new, big, full one. Looking for sand dollars makes her happy, no matter the outcome of the search. As soon as she finds something resembling any part of a sand dollar, her eyes light up. She brags about her find and we won't stop her, because she's happy.
So here are my questions for you: What's your sand dollar? What will you do anything to find, rain or shine? What do you love to do, for no good reason and no matter the outcome? What makes you happy just to be you? Do you have something like that? If you do, why aren’t you doing more of it? If you don’t know what makes your inner light shine, why aren’t you poking around to find it?
Don’t wait to do and find the things that make you happy, make you smile, and make you feel ten years younger. Next time you are about to grab your phone or do something on your to-do list, think about what makes you happy and do that instead.
And remember it’s good to have some backups. Since my mom can't go to the beach any time she wants, she’s learning to knit. So far that’s . . . complicated.
