Soon after I clicked the play button on the cassette player, I could hear the splashing of water, and the giggles of my daughters and their stepsister as they played in the bathtub thirty-two years ago. I was transported back to that summer day when I desperately wanted to preserve those sounds forever. Of course, there were no cell phones back then, so it was a matter of hunting down the cassette recorder, making sure it had batteries, finding and unwrapping a new audio cassette (or recording over an old one that I had to fish out of the car or kitchen junk drawer), and trying to discretely place the recorder close enough to record those little ones’ voices. The recorder had to be out of their sight, because I wanted the moment to be spontaneous.
Of course, by the time I had done all of those steps, the minute I clicked the record button, the giggles quickly turned into angry words. My youngest daughter was trying to get her older sisters to engage in playing with the bathtub toys. “Guys! Guys!” she yelled louder and louder each time, trying to get their attention. “Pretend the ducky…” her voice trailed off. The two older girls continued to talk and play amongst themselves, ignoring her. “GUYS!” she finally yelled at the top of her lungs. Her stepsister swiveled around in the tub, splashing a huge wave of water on the ground, and growled at her little sister angrily, “Ugh! All you ever do is think about yourself!”
Suddenly everything became too quiet. I was certain tears would be next, and peeked around the corner. Instead, my youngest daughter held her little toy duck in her tiny hands, looked at her sisters with her big, brown, innocent eyes and said slowly, in a tiny, gentle, honest little voice, “I always think about myself.” Her sisters raised their eyebrows, and so did I, as the simple truth that she had spoken at the tender age of three penetrated our hearts. “I always think about myself,” was not a selfish phrase. It was truth. We cannot help but think about ourselves.
My young daughter would have made the great Philosopher, Alan Watts, proud. “The meaning of life is just to be alive,” he said, “It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
I clicked the stop button on the thirty-two year old cassette player, sighed and smiled at the memory of that beautiful moment, and reveled in the timeless guidance I had just received from the past.
May you always think about yourself with love. Whatever you celebrate this holiday season, remember to always celebrate YOU. God bless you, and thank you for your support of my work with Dr. Peebles.
