The wooly blue ball careens across the floor bouncing off the fridge and then it’s whacked back toward the dryer where it came from by an extra chubby hand, while being pursued by the perfect joyous laughter of my daughter. That’s the game. That’s the whole game… “Whack & Giggle”, a new olympic event!
My wife has 4 wool, oversized, tennis ball looking things in our dryer that supposedly make your clothes all soft and velvety (and save the world at the same time… dryer sheets are awful. Stop using them immediately). Now, my daughter doesn’t give a crap about feathery soft laundry but she does care, very much, about getting the blue ball out of the dryer and perfecting her Whack & Giggle game.
During the last undertaking of this event, I commented “I wish I could still be that entertained by knocking a blue ball around the floor.” You know, the “poor me, my life’s so complicated now that life’s lost it’s magic” comment? We’ve all done it. And upon hearing my downcast commentary, my wife looked up at me from the grey tile where she was engaged in a rousing game of W&G with our daughter and said… “You still can.” (Cue sound effect of the needle being pulled off the record and all goes silent).
She was 100% correct. Merriment and whimsy aren’t taught and they’re not lost like a wallet or a set of keys. They’re merely forgotten, sitting in the back of our metaphysical closets waiting to be rediscovered and dusted off like a pogo stick of the heart. What the hell is a pogo stick anyway!? Exactly! It can’t be explained, it can only be felt in it’s simple form. There’s no explanation, meaningless answers or abstract definition about why a pogo stick does what it does or why Whack & Giggle does what it does. We remove the reasons why and we just revel in the simple perfection of what is. It’s a freaking miracle that that blue wooly ball rolls across the floor to begin with.
We’re a bunch of energetic ghosts, walking around in temporal skin suits, hurling through undefined space on a giant rock, while we’re breathing life giving air that’s mysteriously contained by this perplexing ozone layer and all the while being pulled to this rock by a magic called gravity which in turn holds the blue wooly ball to the kitchen floor so my daughter can laugh her ass off.
Everything is miraculous, from doing dishes to landing on the moon. From W&G to the pyramids of Giza. We live in a fantasy but treat it like a prison sentence. Sometimes we need to shake it off and re-engage with the radness that is every breath on this planet that we’re given. There’s magic in a blue ball if you let be.
