A Summer Full of Guilt and Glory By Alyssa Nutile On a warm and breezy Saturday morning, we sit in the grass, me with a coffee mug in one hand and the other holding my little boy loosely. “What do you see?” I ask my five-year-old son, gazing out from the top of our backyard hill. I’m trying to foster his skills of stillness and observation. “Nothing,” he says, sounding bored. I am also trying to foster those same skills in myself, punching down feelings of hypocritical irritation that he is not yet interested in a process I haven’t even mastered for myself. “I’ll go first. I see the big lake. And I think I see some little boats out there today too.” He sits up a little bit and cranes his neck. “OH! I see them, Mom! Little white specks! I don’t know if they are that little. It’s a big lake. They might be big boats, Mom.” Now he’s hooked. Vehicles of any kind are pretty much guaranteed to pique his interest. We spend the next ten minutes just looking and noticing. A big fly on a yellow flower. His sister’s feet as she wiggles in her sling chair. The mushrooms growing under our pine tree. For a few minutes, we are just observing. Just being. It’s completely lovely. I assume this is the relaxing feeling people are referring to when they talk about meditation. That’s never a thing that I’ve been good at, so I wouldn’t know. My daughter starts to fuss in her chair down on her porch. “Let’s go, bud. I have to get G.”
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