Snipe Hunt

When I was younger and I spent my summers in a suburb of Boston, the greatest nights were spent on a snipe hunt. If you don’t know what this is I’ll tell you. Basically this is where you get all of the neighborhood children together and keep them busy by having them run around looking in bushes for a fictitious creature. For the adults, the idea of a snipe hunt is ingenious… For the children, it’s an adventure.

So, one night a year about six of us would run through the neighborhood with large nets. We would look in bushes and up trees. We would stay up late in the pursuit of this elusive animal. The adults would laugh at our antics and socialize. They would humor us, telling us they would build a cage for it if we caught one. I remember telling my uncle that I was sure they looked like a cross between a fairy and a hamster. It never mattered that we never found one… it was the chase and the time spent as a group that was important.

Now as an adult I am searching for other elusive creatures. The fairy hamsters aren’t what I am looking for now, but the search is the same. My snipes now are myself, my dreams, love, friendship, and meaning. As adults we tend to focus on the goal, on what we want to find. We forget about the search. We forget how much can be learned and how much joy is simply in the path to finding said things.

Children live life for the experience. They aren’t blinded by their need to reach a goal. They are perfectly happy to run around with large nets in the pursuit of something. So my wish for myself, and for anyone who happens by here, is that we find the joy in our own searching. My wish is that we learn to live in the moment, thankful for the track our paths take us. And if you happen to carry a big net, I’m sure that can only help you when you spot the person you want to love…. It really is hard to outrun those suckers.

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” -- Robert Frost