Leaving Home for Small Adventures
I think I have shared before that I enjoy using Fridays to ready my home for the weekend. It feels good to draw the boundary between my homeschooling life and rhythm and our family life on the weekends. Tidying on Fridays means getting all the school detritus packed away on carts, bookshelves, and bins. It is my way of “clocking out” of my job for the weekend, giving up that low hum of anxiety that most home educators have, wondering if we are doing enough and trying to make everything a learning or teachable moment.
I took my two youngest sons to Cowpens National Battlefield today for a field trip. My 3rd grader is studying South Carolina History, and has been working on a scrapbook all year of the places we have visited, foods tried, and books written by local authors. During a normal year, this project would have been way more fun and engaging. With the pandemic, many national parks and state parks have altered programming, and it’s been challenging to visit places to get a solid, educational experience. I am thankful for what we have been able to do and see in our state because I know that in other places it has been way more restricted and challenging.
I found it hard to leave this morning. As I age, I bump up against inflexibility and a desire to hold to my routines. When will Friday Tidy happen if I take off for most of the day? I know now that routines are deeply life-giving for me, as one who pushed against them for most of my life. Now that I see how valuable they are for my mental and emotional health, I bristle when I think they will be upended. I am no longer carefree and fancy-free, spontaneous and intuitive as I used to be. Some of that saddens me because I can feel like I have swung to an opposite extreme and don’t actively take my younger children on adventures like I did my older ones. I miss out on the joy and wonder of a day spent out-of-the-box.
As much as I love being at home, sometimes I choose to hunker down here in self-protective ways. Choosing extended seasons of living life locally are good, healthy, centering, and keeps our priorities focused. But becoming inflexible and inert can lead us to become uninteresting and even paranoid people. Getting out in the world, traveling, going outside our zip code opens us up to the wonder and beauty of other perspectives and landscapes. Parts of our mind and soul open up, get stimulated, and blossom in the midst of new, exciting ideas and images. As we age, we need that even more! Less rigidity, more flexibility.
I gave up the Friday Tidy for an adventure. I connected with my sons, learned some new historical facts, and am pondering other small trips while the weather is still so welcoming. I will go pick up another son from work, come home, and I bet I will still have the time to tidy and make a simple meal. Adventures don’t always take as much time as we think they will, and they give us more than we realize.
Have a refreshing weekend, maybe with a small adventure thrown in,
Aimee