….or at least makes them interesting in different ways.
As a parent and generally curious person, when I stumble upon a good example to illustrate a point, I hold fast.
This afternoon, and this is all hypothetical pending police and archeological reports, my buddy who may or may not be a civil engineer called me and told me "they" dug up a body wrapped in plastic in a shallow grave on one of his jobs. My thoughts immediately wandered to the coverage I would be reading in the local news. The corpse was reportedly less than eighteen inches below the soil, so I imagined a macabre chuckle at the murderers soon to be exposed laziness. But no! I then, allegedly, received an update call, and it turns out the corpse was not wrapped in plastic, and may, in fact, be a mummy. Aged several hundred years! What was potentially scandalous and salacious became interesting and fascinating, on a more sophisticated level; moving all the same, but in a different way.
And as my daughter has begun Kindergarten and entered the world of potentially hurtful "friends" and circumstances, I've wondered how to tell her that, "this too shall pass," and not sound like a trite asshole. The undeniable truth though is that, while reality never changes, time just makes us see it differently. I am the proud parent of a girl four weeks into Kindergarten and she already has two on-again off-again boyfriends. I need this stuff!
I don't know what we will find out about this deceased individual. Circumstances of the burial point in interesting directions. But I'll remember my sense of things as I shifted from being concerned about some vindictive meth head murderer (yes I jump to conclusions quickly), to pondering an unearthed piece of our collective history. It's all in how you look at something, the perspective. And a lot of what we call perspective just develops with time passed. And while it's true that you can't change time, you can change your perspective.
So when true adolescent disaster strikes, whatever form it takes, I may not be able to change my child's perspective. But, I will have an interesting story to tell, and if she has the where with all to substitute perspective for time, she might be able to see a way to accept an adolescent set-back, in what looked like disaster in the moment.
