To Kick A Rock

There are times when I feel like I’ve lost touch with my inner child, completely taken over by maturity. Sure, maturity is good for some things, like owning a car, or being able to tell kids to stay off your lawn or you’ll slap them with one humdinger of a lawsuit, but in general, it just seems to make things more complicated.

Luckily, there are times when I flash back to being a kid, and when I do, I find it to be incredibly refreshing.

Take today for example, during my usual noontime walk.

I go for a walk every day at lunch not for the exercise, but to escape my cubicle for a short while, since we don’t get along very well. It seems to tolerate me, and I tolerate it, but there’s still some serious tension between us. This is probably because I don’t want to be there, and it’d rather be alone. Sometimes, I think it’s plotting against me, trying to determine, for example, the best time to collapse on top of me.

Anyway, I was walking along the side of the road when I saw a rock. This wasn’t just any rock, however, it was a perfect kicking rock. It was big enough to make a good target, but not so big that it’d hurt your toe. It was also slightly rectangular, which would make it easier to hit squarely with good power, which is a very fulfilling endeavor.

Unsurprisingly, moments later I was completely absorbed in kicking the rock down the street.

The key to rock kicking is timing. After you kick the rock, you then have to try to measure your steps correctly, so that when you catch up to it, your kicking foot is already at its furthest point back, ready to be unleashed. If you do it right, you can kick the rock without breaking stride, which makes you feel very smooth and cool. If you don’t, you end up having to awkwardly stutter-step to set yourself up, which is very embarrassing.

Unfortunately, my timing was a little rusty. It’d been a long time since I’d rock-kicked.

Anybody watching me out of an office window would have seen a guy staring intently at the street in front of him, meandering back and forth, not paying very much attention to his surroundings, and all-too-often stutter-stepping violently for no apparent reason. If it wasn’t known that I was rock-kicking, the most obvious conclusion would have been complete inebriation.

At one point, I wandered out into the middle of the road to chase down an errant kick. Luckily, this was a side street, and the traffic was light.

Eventually, I had to turn a corner. As I did, I tried to kick with my opposite foot – as the rock was lined up better for that – and I whiffed completely. Feeling my face turning red with failure, I kept on going, leaving the rock behind.

However, for a glorious minute or two, I'd been a kid again, without a care in the world, my biggest priority seeing just how long I could kick a rock down the street. Ahhhhhh. You just need that every once in a while.

Then I got back to the office, and I wasn’t a kid any longer.

But I suppose it’s for the best. A kid wouldn’t know how to deal with a cubicle that seems to be plotting his ultimate demise.