Today was a perfect Florida morning. A breeze ripped through the open doors of our house, stirring a fresh, clean scent through my room, slowly pulling me to the closet to don a sweater and scarf. It was one of those Sunday mornings I felt inspired to pick up a book and read for a few hours before church.
The nearest book, sitting on our living room couch was “the Magnolia Story” by HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. In the first chapter, I was hooked. Joanna’s down to earth style and Chip's comical input left me wanting to desperately to know these people and feeling like I already do. Gaines shared about the time she hid in a closet to avoid an arrest, the morning Chip forgot their newborn at home and the day she had to let one of her greatest dreams die. Their life has captivated millions for good reason.
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But by chapter seven, I’d been staring out the window for some time. I realized one of the things she said was tugging on my thoughts. In reflecting back on her childhood and the little dreams she had - living on a farm, owning her own business, speaking to an audience - she speculated, “I wonder sometimes if we know ourselves a lot better than we think we do when we’re children. We get into our teen years and college years and so many of us let others redefine who we are, or we get lost along the way and have no idea what we really want to do with our lives. But once we finally figure it out, it often seems easy to look back into our childhoods and find a few clues that say, “Hey, maybe you were headed in that direction all along.”
Those “little dreams” were only small reflections of who she would one day be and it made me wonder about my own “little dreams”. The deeper I dug into their story, the deeper I dug into my own, and now I invite you to do the same. Stare out the window, lose some time, get lost in thought for a minute.
As a kid did you have habits, hobbies and little quirks that made you a bit different? Did you get in trouble at school for the drawings you filled your notebooks with? Did you tinker with your parent's electronics, breaking them apart only to spend hours teaching yourself how to put them back together?
It’s hard to figure out what we’re supposed to spend our lives on. What legacy we will leave. But like Joanna, maybe some of those clues lie in the past. In the innocent, unfiltered mind of a five year old-kid. I love Myer’s-Briggs and any personality test you can find with a quick google search, but I’m confident our five year olds selves will reveal more about how we’re wired than any 50 question assessment ever will. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about the innocent, unfiltered mind we used to have.
