We were walking through the park one afternoon, and I was deep in my phone.
Checking messages, replying to emails, scrolling through updates I didn’t even care about.
“Daddy” he said. “You’re missing it.”
“Missing what?” I asked, still half-distracted.
He pointed to the sky.
“The clouds are shaped like trucks!”
I looked up. There they were. A pick-up truck towing a car made of cotton and sunlight.
For a moment, I laughed.
Then I felt a quiet kind of guilt.
He wasn’t just showing me clouds.
He was showing me what I’d stopped noticing.
Somewhere along the way, adults trade wonder for Wi-Fi.
We start seeing days as schedules instead of stories.
We stop looking up.
That day, I put my phone in my pocket.
We lay on the grass.
Named every cloud. Let time breathe again.
It didn’t make me more productive.
But it made me more present.
And maybe that’s the better kind of progress.
One day, I’ll remind him to look ahead.
But today, he reminded me to look up.