Skip to main content

Aliveness, Gratitude, and Contentment

"I wanna go see dinosaur bones. Dinosaur boooooooooones..." Followed by intense sobbing, followed by intense waterworks. 

I kinda get it. Eri often advises me to avoid telling the boys about what I'm planning. I like promoting an attitude of looking forward to special things with a dusting of delayed gratification, but it's Kenzo and Osamu. They're little boys. If things don't go according to their expectations it destroys them most times.

Osamu was feeling the intense disappointment I caused by announcing last week and writing on the family wall calendar that we would be going to see the dinosaur bone exhibit at the the Sendai Science Museum.

In the end it turned out to be a stormy day, Osamu had to go to the doctor because he had a bad cough and runny nose, and Kenzo and I were fully exhausted from a crazy week and held down the fort on the sofa all morning watching Harry Potter movies.


Dinosaur bones was not happening today.

I was thinking of something I read a long time ago.

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."


Eri made one of her specialties tonight. Slow cooked pork chops.

Every day I am consciously trying to acknowledge and cherish my treasures in order to cultivate a deeper sense of aliveness, gratitude, and contentment.



The boys got summertime haircuts tonight. Eri wanted to put a little space between their haircuts and our big trip in case she totally messed up.

They look great.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mr. Blue Sky

Man, I conked out so hard on the living room floor tonight. Right after bath time, before story time. I barely remember. Completely exhausted. Big adventure day. Another in a long series I hope the boys will remember when they’re older... our first IMAX movie, a downtown city outing, and some life lessons in the game center. We left the house at 9:15 a.m. and didn’t get back until nearly 6 p.m., totally spent but full of pizza and memories. The Wild Robot in IMAX was totally stunning. The scale, the colors, the sound. We could feel every gust of wind and rustle of leaves. I made sure we had prime seats, row G, right in the center. Two big buckets of popcorn too, which, according to Kenzo and Osamu, I  absolutely should not  be sharing. “You should get your own!” they kept saying. I think a little bit of popcorn thievery is well within my rights as the papa. After the movie, we headed through the cold and wind across to the game center on the other side of Sendai Station. Being...

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep.  But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time.  When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it.  I looked down at my l...