paper boats and pretend

we move through life too quickly, always looking ahead, always running, always "just trying to make it through the day". we don't enjoy it while it lasts, the way children do, where everyday is an adventure, a chance to play, to pretend, to see new possibilities and games and people and fun. i want that in my life. i want to see the world the way a child does again. i was talking with paige over the weekend about imagination and childhood--we listened to "paper boat" by cocoon, all about childhood pretending games, and i realized that when you are a child, the world is infinitely vast! that you can have a piece of paper, folded into a boat, and suddenly you see infinite possibilities in it. the infinite avenues of "pretend". and then suddenly we're adult and everything is concrete. a paper boat is a piece of paper. or more specifically, wood, bark and glue, bleached and pressed really thin. we lose our sense of divine wonder, of inestimable imagination, pretend. when we're told to be as children, that is part of it--we need to regain that sense of seeing the world as so much larger than what our eyes really see. of being able to pretend and imagine possibilities, and see beyond the concrete restrictions of the paper with which our boats are made and the blankets that make the walls of our forts. we are living now in such a world, where we have limited resources, and so much of our success depends on our ability to see the castles in the clouds, the boats in the paper, the miracles in the everyday, the divine in each of us.