We were walking through the park one afternoon,
and I was buried in my phone.
Checking messages.
Replying to emails.
Scrolling through updates I did not even care about.
“Daddy,” my child 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 pickup truck towing a car,
made of cotton and sunlight.
I laughed.
Then I felt a quiet kind of guilt.
Because he was not just showing me clouds.
He was showing me what I had stopped noticing.
Somewhere along the way,
adults trade wonder for Wi-Fi.
We start seeing days as schedules, not stories.
We stop looking up.
That day, I slipped my phone into my pocket.
We lay on the grass.
Named every cloud.
Let time breathe again.
It did not make me more productive.
But it made me more present.
And maybe that
is the better kind of progress.
One day, I will teach him to look ahead.
But today,
he taught me to look up.