What's A Good Wish? How Can We Know?

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The other week I was with a group of my husband’s extended family, most of us there from out of state. We were gathered in our Airbnb and the scene was crowded and loud — laughter, talking, moving around, glasses and plates clinking, lots of bodies.

This is what a gentle four-year-old girl walked into.

I saw her as soon as her mother walked into the room carrying the girl in her arms. This small creature’s face was buried in her mother’s neck, between clavicle and ear. I knew immediately that she was scared and over-stimulated. We adults are a cacophonous lot.

I can’t stomach a scared child, so I scanned the room to see if there was any object I could use to entice and interest her. Curiosity has a salving effect on fear.

As luck would have it, a small furry stuffed bear was sitting on a shelf as part of a display of fake flowers and other knickknacks. I grabbed it and walked over to the girl.

“Hi,” I said softly as she kept her head buried and safe. “Would you like to hold this?”

Her mother, my husband’s cousin, smiled at me. Slowly the girl’s face emerged from the neck, and she saw the furry bear. She reached over, took it, and pressed it to her body. She smiled a faint smile.

“My name’s Stephanie. What’s yours?” She whispered her name.

“This is Jaime,” her mother said.

“Oh, hi Jamie. Nice to meet you. Would you like to come with me to see if we can find any toys in this house? I know a place we could look.”

She nodded, wiggled down from her mother’s arms, and from then on, we were friends. In fact, after a couple of days, I called us “besties” — which was true. For me, sometimes gentle four-year-olds are preferable to cacophonous adults. Sorry, adults.

That night at the Airbnb, while everyone was catching up after years of being apart, Jaime and I had a playdate. The first thing we did was to get toys, which you need on a playdate — or a place to run with imaginary play. We had both.

As we poked around the garage, we found an old plastic shallow circular tray on four legs. It stood two feet high. It’s supposed to hold water to create a makeshift imaginary water world. This would be a toy you’d play with outside in the summer in your bathing suit. It had small toy buckets and watering cans, ferris wheels that rotate when you pour water on them, and floating plastic animals — perfect for our playdate.

Since we were bringing it into the living room of the Airbnb and I didn’t want to get a water mitigation bill from the owner when we checked out, there’d be no water in our plastic water world, but we didn’t need any. We used it to have a wild conversation driven by a 4-year-old inspired by this waterless contraption.

At one point, Jaime held up an invisible star high into the air.

“This is a star,” she told me, “You can make a wish.”

Hmm. A wish. When someone invites me to make a wish, I usually mine deep into my soul to find the biggest, most salient wish dwelling there.

“I wish,” I said, speaking like this was do-or-die, “Happiness for all people.”

I wanted this to come true down to my core. Jaime had other ideas.

“Don’t make that wish,” she told me with four-year-old uppity insistence, “Make a good wish. Wish that we can have water for this toy!”

I hadn’t thought of that wish. It never occurred to me I could ask for water for our toy table — remember, water mitigation bill. I giggled inside because you don’t want to giggle at someone’s wish. Water for a toy vs. global happiness. Whose wish would win a wish contest?

This is an impossible question. There is no winner — or there are two. A wish is a wish. It’s something that matters to the wishes.

If I look at her wish through my eyes, I suppose I could see water for our table as putting the oxygen mask on ourselves first so that we’re able to help the world — gain happiness before moving to Big Philanthropy.

The bigger question is — why would I look at her wish through my eyes? Her wish has everything to do with her eyes. Wishes become beautiful once seen through the wisher’s perspective.

I know the water wish was based on being four years old. I know the global happiness wish was based on an aging woman growing into these large philosophical questions. This is why both wishes are winners.

From a scared four-year-old’s perspective, being happier in a foreign, loud, adult-focused Airbnb rather than hiding against your mom’s neck is a forward-thinking goal. Building onto the relief this new old lady friend provides you by asking for water the two of you can enjoy is a brilliant move. Water might increase the fun with your new friend and build the friendship. Maybe it’d bring more giggles and connection. Maybe it’d be a chance to use the creativity you were born with and utilize the joie de vivre you’re slowly getting a sense is your baseline happiness mark.

A water wish is a good, smart, viable wish for making the best use of precious time — even if you, as a four-year-old, have no earthly idea how precious it is.

What about the wish based on an aging woman’s yearning for global happiness? Just as water for the water table on the Airbnb’s wooden flooring isn’t going to happen, global happiness won’t either. Not today, not soon. So, is it a smart wish?

If you saw this wish through my eyes, you’d notice that wishing for such an impossible thing strengthens my tendency toward compassion and perhaps opens my eyes wider to the plight of others. The moment I say, “I wish for global happiness for all,” I realize how fortunate I am. I feel bad that I don’t realize this more often. I put myself into others’ shoes. I challenge myself to be as kind as possible. I remember that when folks are difficult to handle it’s usually because they are having a hard day, so have a little compassion and understanding, Steph.

From this view, through my eyes, this is a good wish.

Thanks to my new bestie and a plastic waterless table, I learned a small wish can be rather big, and an impossible one consequential. I learned that the closer to someone’s wish I get, the truer to the wish maker I’m willing to look.

Whether water or happiness — or the eight billion wishes out there at this moment — they mean more than I realize.

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Have a nice week, friends.