You’re in the water!

I wish I could arbitrarily declare a new rule or boundry and everyone just had to accept it.

I took the little miss to a playground after work and school today. She mostly played on her own or with me but for a little while she played with a few older girls.

The leader of the group was clearly enjoying her dictatorship and making sure to announce the next thing in order to keep all the other girls off balance and unable to declare some different idea. At one point there were four little girls on a large teeter totter and one of the girls wasn’t listening to the older boss girl. The girl in charge was getting frustrated and making demands but this younger girl really wanted to get her plastic shovel that was off in the sand. The younger girl got off of the teeter totter and started walking towards her shovel. The girl in charge, clearly having excercised all of her options, used the only weapon she had left. The younger girl had gotten two steps away from her shovel when the girl in charge shouted, “you’re in the water. You can’t be in the water. Get back in the boat.”

That’s right, this little girl changed the reality for all the other girls involved. Just moments ago the teeter totter was a car and they were driving somewhere, but she made a new declaration and the car disappeared and the road instantly turned to sea. At least, those changes happened for her and the little girls on the teeter totter. The girl heading for the shovel was faced with a dilemma and it really stopped her for a moment. She absolutely, without question, needed to get this plastic shovel. But, about the worst breech of ettiquette for children is to not accept the rules of a game. Even when those rules are changed in an instant and only changed to serve the interests of one bossy little girl. It’s okay to make the world change by declaring something new, it’s not okay to ignore the new declaration. I don’t know why this is how the playground works but it is.

The little girl who needed that damn shovel, though, determined that her need for the shovel was greater than her need to obey the rules of the pack. She took the last two steps to get her shovel. The girl in charge was irritated and the sea disappeared. The other little girls invovled got off of the teeter totter and everyone moved on to their own things. No one could maintain the fantasy at that point because it had been proven false.

Someday I’m going to be in a meeting at work and I’m going to want someone to stop saying literally the most boring thing in the world ( this happens at every meeting I’ve ever been in, sometimes I say it) and I will declare that no one in a blue shirt can use nouns and maybe, just maybe everyone will accept it and the boring will stop. Or maybe the boring shovel will win.

LW