Someone is Watching You

Sounds like the title to a slasher movie but not this time.

I pulled my hair back and put an elastic ponytail tie on it this morning. That brought me back to a few weeks ago when I had my grandson at my house. He will be two soon, so he was 18 months old, give or take a little. I noticed him pick up a hair tie that had been left on the table by my chair, and I watched him as he absent-mindedly slipped it on his wrist. I've done this same thing a hundred times, and as his mother has long hair, I know he's seen her do the same thing, too. It was the casualness of it that caught my attention. His mind said, "I know what to do with this," and he did it without even thinking about it. How many other things do we do that we think are unnoticed but might be observed?

On the flip side, this meme reminds us that we are mostly NOT as important as we think we might be, and that, most likely, people are NOT watching us, but when it comes to little kids, they are most likely paying a lot more attention to what we do than we think they are. (Pay no mind to that run-on sentence)

There's no real reason for this post, except it's part of my Chaotic Collection of Random Writing, and I'm not being preachy because I know there's a lot of things I do that would not be a good example. It just seemed profound how easily such a small, reflexive gesture had imprinted itself on a child's mind.