I will control myself.

Business halts at 12:30 PM on Fridays in the summer. While I have every intention of using some of my afternoon for productivity, I decided long before I locked up the office that my life deserved an inspiration break. 

I sat down at a perched seat in a local coffee shop with no plans, a scenario that is markedly more uncomfortable than it used to be. Rather than being overwhelmed by things worth writing about, moments worth documenting, words worth preserving, my mind's reach was arrested. As is somewhat typical in my wandering thoughts, I immediately blamed this curse called "growing up" with which I've become quite familiar. 

So, I stretched my vision beyond what was right in front of me and toward a favorite website of mine: Found Magazine. They shine a spotlight on "strange, hilarious, and heartbreaking things people have picked up and passed [their] way." Each time I type its web address into my browser, I relate it to buying a box of random stuff (that someone I'll never know deemed important enough to keep around) at an estate sale, upon which you cannot help but impose imagined answers to that relentless question of "Why?" (More about Found Magazine)

At the very bottom of the page:

Almost reflexively, I imagined a child painstakingly copying sentences an old-school schoolmarm demanded. Naturally, this made me wonder what action or behavior inspired such a sentence.*

Did he shout excitedly, but out of line, about the material he was being taught? Did he shake another student alive who had fallen asleep during a riveting lesson?

Probably not.
But we'll never know.  

Which left me thinking: Is this the moment, the one in which the child's behavior were deemed disorderly and out of control, that the kid was hexed with the "growing up" curse? It's as if you can see his subconscious resistance to the effort to keep his sentences aligned - controlled - by forcing his l's into a straight line. I will control myself. I will control myself. I will control...

The educator in me took the reigns of my thoughts at this point. Characteristically, I started dreaming. What if this child had written and re-written a different sentence? Etching a lesson into his mind to become part of his future, disciplined self? 

I will not stop dreaming.

I will do what I love. 

I will chase what I am passionate about.
I will create a better world. 

I will serve others.

I will portray goodwill and understanding.

Idealistic, sure. There is something pragmatic disguised in this thought, though.
What lesson did you learn as a child that still holds you back today? 

*sen-tence (noun) \ˈsen-t^ən(t)s, -t^ənz\

1. one formally pronounced by a court or judge in a criminal proceeding and specifying the punishment to be inflicted upon the conviction
2. a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pause
3. all all of the above