Terrafin, or Feeling Things Intently

My son is absolutely ecstatic with anticipation.  He loves the video game Skylanders, and he’s been waiting for at least 6 months to get the character Terrafin, shown above.  I write this on Tuesday afternoon, and the figurine should be delivered this afternoon.  It allows you to be this character within the game in a world called Skyland, which are islands floating in the air. My son's grandma just flew in today, though, and he has music concert tonight, and so he won’t be able to play with it much today.  He was totally bummed about that.

Do you remember what it was like to anticipate things when you were a kid?  Oh, the agony, the torture!  There’s a great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip series (which you can see here) about this very thing.  Wanting something so bad and having to wait.  Once we ordered it, my son only had to wait two days, though ~ a huge difference from when I was a kid.

I wonder if kids experience these kinds of things more intensely.  We certainly get more patient with age, and we get blunted somehow.  Self-preservation, maybe. 

But I think it would do us good to remember, sometimes, what it’s like to remain that open, to feel things that intently.  Sometimes not, a lot of times it’s too much.  But that’s the state that’s the most alive, the most creative.