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I said I wanted to live by the sea when I grew up, and everybody laughed. “You’d have sand all over the house,” said my mother. “You’d never stop hoovering,” said my gran. This confused me, because my gran never stopped hoovering anyway, and we were miles from any sand. But still I absorbed the lesson. Beauty was impractical. It was not for everyday folk like us.
I will want to spend a day walking somewhere beautiful, and he will want to spend an afternoon in a noisy trampolining centre, with flashing disco lights and rave music, and the perpetual threat of heads bashed together.
It is a strange business, this unlearning. I am not a beginner. I am further back than that, burdened with the work of forgetting what I thought I already knew.
I’ve noticed how often we do that, cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions—usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay—and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations, particularly those that involve careful introspection.
I may not have a divine voice whispering in my ear to render it all clear, but I’m fairly certain that God—however you conceive of them—didn’t plan for any of us to be racist. Every one of us has some kind of work to do.
We all find our play in different places, after all. Some of us in the search for follies, some of us in the stories they suggest. What matters is that we play at all, that we nurture that particular quality of attention, that we keep up the dialogue between our play and others’. It is a flame that is worth shielding, if only because it allows us to read the contours of the land, to sense the heat pooling beneath the soil.
We have forgotten how to want one good dress over fifty disposable ones. We have forgotten how to crave each new food as it comes into season.
If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.
He’s now past the age when I could carry his sleeping form out of the car, and I miss it even as we’re making plans.
