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What Taking a Spin in a Dryer Taught Me About Life
That may help you
I’d been on the lightly-dried-kid setting for six seconds.
It was the shortest roller coaster ride I ever went on.
It was evening, and I was seven years old.
My brother’d asked, and there was no hesitation from me.
I wanted to try it. I was ready.
My brother bundled me in a comforter, and I climbed into the dryer.
“Push your arms against the sides,” he told me. I nodded, and he closed the door and started it.
The barrel turned. I went from right side up to left side down.
Warmth covered me as my body scrunched into a roly-poly in the dryer. There were no deep thuds and groans as I spun.
I wasn’t a pair of shoes crashing from the top to the bottom.
I just spun.
And I learned so much about life.
So, here’s the lessons I learned from the metal roller coaster in our basement. May you get to take this ride one day.
Savor the seconds, not the years
A seven-year-old kid can’t stay in a dryer forever, but taking that short, wild ride in the drum of ours taught me to savor the tiny moments.
For a little while.
Until I turned eight.
Soon after, I fully understood what death was and developed a death anxiety that would stay with me for the next 24 years.
Envisioning myself as a floating consciousness in space with memories of life and the knowledge that I could never get it back.
I was terrified, and I used to blame death for my misery, but the problem was me.
I hadn’t learned to savor one of the 2.5 million seconds I might get, but only to worship the last one.
And sometimes, that can happen to all of us.
And we miss out on all of the magnificent little moments in the middle by moving too fast, talking too much, and chasing after goals someone else wants for us.
