Sometimes I miss the quiet onlooker days of my childhood, when I would look and just take things in about the world around me…innocently….somewhat nonjudgmentally… So that is what I am finding myself attracting back to.

I sit back as an adult and observe the world around me. I scroll on social media, I work, I raise a family and I sit and realize that I have become so bloated with opinions that sometimes I can hardly move. It might be my own microwaved opinion or another’s home cooked one, but they are all absorbed into my body and sticky goo throughout my innards.
I’ve somewhat prided myself on maintaining flexible open-mindedness, but I see closed minds and open mouths and open minds and closed mouths and wonder where on the spectrum I even fall anymore. I decide to keep mum on the way I feel about a lot of things. Nobody is beating down doors to discover how I truly feel about politics, religion, or any of the hot topics anyways, so it should be really easy to be quiet.
But there is a problem. I can’t ditch this thing called ‘my voice’. I have found it and even though I try to distract it by saying things like, “Hey LOOK…wasn’t that Tom Cruise?!” and running like hell to get away from it… It finds me.

The difference now is that I am more cognizant of discipline. My son has a poster at his school. It’s a poster that asks you to reflect on these things before speaking ‘Is it necessary? Is it kind? Is it helpful? Is it honest?’ I’m not so naïve to think that our own natural impulsive human tendencies won’t get in the way of this practice. My over exposure to social media and real life people have given me opportunities to write and speak and I’m finding it to be a liability of sorts.

Seeing two sides to every topic is so exhausting, but it really does keep me in a place of understanding. Understanding why people do what they do, why they are who they are…Humanity 101. It doesn’t mean that I have to be all of those things. It doesn’t have to mean I agree with all those things, but sometimes it just means that my opinion can pass on the indulgence or have its cake, eat it too, and never have Instagrammed the cake in the first place.