toothless grin

Another rite of passage we’ve all been through, is our first loose tooth. Staying awake all night wriggling it, sure its gonna come out at any point now that we feel it moving! The excitement and the certainty of the process becomes our roller coaster. After a few days of excitement and anticipation we adjust and it becomes just a part of our world, our experience. Ya, its getting looser, but its just an immediate part of the Now that we exist in as children. Until finally one day it just falls out in an apple, and we are a mired in wonder once again, as we shove our tongues into the huge, weird tasting hole left behind! This is often our first cognitive experience with the process of growing up and being an active part of life unfolding. Its an entire process, a journey of shared experience, one of our first awareness's of our connection to humanity. When we return to grade school to show our friends the next day, some will lecture us knowingly about what it was like for them, some will stare in wonder and awe, asking questions and making faces, with round eyes of fear and respect. And some, the older kids, will roll their eyes and call us and our friends babies as they run through the play ground and take the ball we dropped as everyone stared at the wriggler. Life goes on, they've been through it, and however frightening a new journey, experience, habit, or behavior may be for those of us on the path for the first time, there is always someone older, wiser, more experienced for whom our avalanche of emotional turmoil is just a well known piece of the pie for a road walked many times, and as familiar as an old pair of shoes. They know there is nothing to worry about and no big danger, its just normal. This is perhaps the most magnificent thing about our human condition. The need to constantly seek new experience, and to live in a state of excitement and adventure, and then to learn it, know it, become its master and share the map with some new greenhorn, bright eyed with fear and wonder, to lend a hand and help trust emerge where perhaps there was none before, to invoke a sense of strength and confidence in our successors before we move along the road to our next new experience. We journey from novice to master to teacher, then set out on new roads where we can begin the cycle again, and conquer new fears and hurdles in our quest to eventually realize were all the same, -even in our differences. We are one. back at home, some of us will find money in exchange for the lost tooth when its left under our pillow. But its the shared experience, the little rite of passage and experiential learning that comes from it that is the real gift, the actual exchange. But the tooth fairy idea leads me to the question, what do other cultures do?