We’ve been moving this week and I found something very special to me in our garage. Under the Christmas tree and tucked behind my husband’s military uniforms. There he was. Woodward.
Meet Woodward. Woodward’s been a friend of mine since I was five years old. When I was five, we were building our family home and I was that kid that was digging in the dirt, pushing cars in the mud, and playing with the concrete chunks. In my exploration, I collected wood scraps. I found a hammer, some large nails lying around, and took the scraps from a wood pile. I wanted him to have hinged arms so they could bend. I used my markers to color in his clothes and make his smile.
I didn’t keep many of my toys from my childhood, but I kept Woodward. He reminds me of something.
I look at him and I see what it’s like to be a child. To look at a pile of scrap wood, bound for the trash, and see something in it. To get a hammer, nails, and even though you’ve never used them, you do it anyway. My parents never stopped me. They didn’t tell me to put the tools down. They didn’t throw Woodward away. They never told me playing with giant nails and a hammer was too dangerous– I’m sure they were there, but they probably let me bang up my own thumb and get splinters while I made Woodward. They gave me something better than too much help or too many restrictions…. they gave me the time and the space to create. They let me make a big mess and they allowed me to learn, explore, my way, the kind made of crushed thumbs and crooked boards.
And today? I value that so much. That space I had to learn. Woodward is a messy little crooked reminder of what learning looks like to me. He’s far from perfect, but he’s perfectly mine. Part of my journey.
I think Woodward will have a place on my desk this school year. Nestled between iPad chargers and app codes, he’ll stand there smiling. A reminder that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes. Standing tall on the idea that innovation is not about “stuff,” but it’s about what you do. The intersection of ideas and actions. Seeing a pile of scrap wood, knowing it can be so much more, and then building it.
And knowing, thirty years later, that it’s one of the most valuable things you own. The idea that became something. Something priceless.
NOTE: Please excuse my dog looking on in the background. I think she see something special in Woodward too…. something to chew up. :)