Last night, my daughter and I set out to build a fort in our basement living room. I’m not hesitant to say I’m a good fort builder. I’ve had lots of practice over the years with three previous kids. Still, I’m always amazed at how differently I tend to view something like building a tent than how my kids do.
The fun for me is deciding how to strategically place each and every blanket and where to best situate the couch cushions and how to use the chairs to guard the entry way. The fun for me is making everything grand. In other words, I think like an adult. Ugh. Boring. Pretentious. Self-important. The fun for my kids is what you can do with the tent, not what it looks like. They want to build fast and get to playing. They want to battle the pirates gathering outside or trap the bear clawing at the roof or the fight the ghosts trying to break in.
I love that, too, but sadly my ability to suspend belief has gotten more difficult as I’ve gotten older. I think that’s the product of living in a result-oriented world where personal worth is often determined by what and how much you produce. The fact that it carries over into imaginary worlds is terrifying. It’s troubling that I find myself more worried about the tent’s roof that’s now sagging because the cat jumped on it and it might appear to strangers than what we should do about the witch my daughter says is cackling outside the door and is going to do terribly hideous things to us.
I know my daughter has the right perspective. It’s not like we’re going to move into this tent smack dab in the living room and take up residence. Why not get it up fast and get to playing? We can always build another tent. We can’t get back moments lost to build imaginary worlds. Last night offered proof. By the time I put the final touches on a first-rate tent featuring three separate chambers, including two sleeping rooms, bed time was approaching and we’d barely even begun fighting pirates or wrestling grizzly bears. Tent wasted.
Lesson: Sometimes spending less effort upfront means better results later on.
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