Wisdom from the Mouths of Babes

     Sometimes wisdom slips out of the mouths of babes and falls as gently as autumn leaves.
     Wisdom like this landed on me during a recent visit to our daughter Ashley and her family at their Alaska home. One day Ashley and I stood in the kitchen pondering how we could turn an assortment of leftovers into a meal. We were stuck. Ashley’s three-year-old daughter Eve listened nearby. Suddenly her tiny voice piped up, “Work what ya got.”
     She’d heard the phrase “work with what you’ve got’’ from a children’s rescue program, and now she was coming to our rescue. Translation? We didn’t need to get all complex; we simply needed to work with what we had.
     I thought about Eve’s advice when she and I hiked along a forested path that runs through their backyard. Life can be a bumpy trail strewn with rocks and roots ready to trip me. It may be people issues, health issues, time issues, or personal energy issues that leave me baffled about how to navigate those challenges without tripping. I sometimes feel like the anonymous writer who observed that “my ducks are not in a row. I don’t even know where some of them are. And I’m pretty sure one of them is a pigeon.”
     Now when I’m stuck, I hear Eve’s little voice advising me to “work what ya got.”
​     So that’s what I do.