beauty{full}: leaving space (part two)

This evening after dinner the Little Man exclaimed, "We didn't watch any TV this week!" His apparent surprise at this seeming phenomenon made me roll my eyes. Especially since I know he spent the entire drive to Dallas and back watching DVDs, so he wasn't even right in his TV-less conclusion.

I have spent the last week trying to detox the kids after two weeks of cuddles on the couch and Thomas the Tank Engine. I let things slide because they were sick, and I think that's legitimate (don't tell me if you disagree--I will wallow in self-induced guilt), but my immediate thought following Littles' pronouncement was how many more fun things we were able to do together because we weren't sitting with our eyes glued to the TV screen while our brains rotted out. We went for walks, played at the playground, saw friends, ran errands, got books at the library--the list could continue.

And then, because I spend too much time reading children's books, I thought of what Mama Bear said in The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV: I don't have anything against TV; it's the TV habit I don't like. I could add, it's the smart phone habit and the laptop habit and the radio habit and any number of other things. The truth is that, at least for me, it is too easy to get sucked in. I am guilty as charged. But how much do I miss when I allow myself to substitute entertainment for true enjoyment, social networking for true society, constant contact for real community?

Yes, we can find real beauty in a well-developed film or an encouraging email from a friend or a lovely piece of music. But we can also miss out on a great deal of beauty if we forget to live life because we're too busy letting someone else do so for us. We must remember to make space for the beauty that is already around me just waiting to be acknowledged.

I wish I asked myself a little more often what I could turn off in order to leave even a little more space for beauty.

{If you're looking for the rest of this series, all the links can be found here. Thank you so much for joining with me this month.}