I am always finding new things to appreciate about being a mom, but on Thursdays I pull focus on something that has been particularly striking or meaningful to me this last week.

Today, I lost my wallet at the park.

Pretty much everyday I take Josey to the same park to swing and today, I dropped my wallet from the stroller under the swing as I was heading away from the park. I had been gone from the park for a good hour and got a call from the person who found it, without even realizing I had lost it. It was a dad who was taking his child for a swing and found it underneath.

While I’ve had many things I’ve lost returned to me by strangers, I was surprised as that park has a tendency to be frequented by somewhat questionable activities after hours.

Because I believe in the law of attraction, I choose to focus on seeing everything that is valuable to me coming back to me and being surrounded by good people. But still, my mind wandered for a moment. What if I had lost that wallet just a half a block down near the bus stop where the landscape was a little less idyllic, where a more transient population wandered?

I believe that one of the greatest gifts that children bring us is their inherent goodness, some call it innocence, that shines so brightly from the very beginning. I believe that this is because they come more recently from Source, that pure positive vibration which remembers itself as love.

And while I also believe that adults are all still connected to that Source, the longer we are here in our physical bodies, the easier it can be to become resistant to that pure positive knowingness or be trained away from it by focusing on how to protect ourselves from pain.

I am certainly aware that before I had a child, it was easier to focus in this way, and I had to often work on that crust of protectiveness around my heart that would separate me from others.

Now I’m sure the man who found my wallet today would have done the same if the wallet was elsewhere or if he didn’t have a child. However, I’m also aware, now that I have a child, of feeling like I’ve been given a new license for innocence. And what I mean by that is not naiveté but rather an awareness of all the other parents who want to be their better selves and to have a better world because they want it for their children. That shared wish is a club that I didn’t know existed, and one of the coolest I’ve ever joined.

Blessings to you this beautiful day!