Visitor Eyes

Sometimes I just have to look at where I live through a visitor’s eyes.

Our 8yo son called his Nana for Thanksgiving today. About halfway through the conversation she asked how we’d been spending our days off during the Thanksgiving break. She asked specifically if we’d gone for any rides on the bike path behind our house.

Bike path? Oh, that’s right, we live right up against the Santa Ana River Trail and Parkway, which stretches from San Bernardino all the way to Newport Beach. In the midst of our suburban wasteland, it is a little stretch of undeveloped nature where we can walk, jog or ride our bikes. For free.

After wasting a whole week of vacation with mindless videos, staying up late and sleeping in until embarrassing hours, it occurred to me that we’d hardly left the house. Not a walk, or a family stroll around the neighborhood. We had simply succumbed to the sluggish life of glassy-eyed entertainment drones.

So, after being reminded, that we in fact have a resource we’ve neglected, we brushed off the snacking crumbs from our shirts, donned our jogging shoes and actually got active for a few minutes. It felt so good to get outside and away from Angry Birds, Facebook and Iron Chef. The air felt clean and my stale limbs rejoiced grudgingly as I started to move.

Made me wonder why it took looking at my environment with visitor eyes to see the beauty, the resources we have right under our oblivious noses. We get so jaded and familiar…living in Southern California with it’s temperate weather, no humidity and proximity to beaches and mountains gets boring. Or we get so caught up in auto-pilot life that we forget to open our eyes and really see what is around us. Sometimes it just takes someone who doesn’t live here to jar us awake.

So, my Ten Faithful Readers….is there a challenge in this? What if today we walked through life with visitor’s eyes and discovered a few things to thank God for. Even in Riverside, there are the orange groves along Victoria, or the 1940’s bungalows in the Wood Streets, or who knows what else.

Go ahead, put on your visitor eyes and see what you can see.

By decarter in Uncategorized