What would it be like, not to worry?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to not worry about how you parent? To not worry if you are doing the right thing, making sure your kids are safe and well, to not worry if you are making the right decisions in life? Not be anxious that your son is going to end up a drop out living on the street, or your daughter is going to end up pregnant at fourteen?
How would it be to walk through life without worries?
“When my kids were young, I wanted to lock my daughter up so she couldn’t mess with or get messed with by males and I was all over my son like a rash to make sure he knew about responsibility, because he needed to be accountable to the community he lived in and be a responsible part of that community. You might think that is maybe a bit intense, full of demands and expectations and well, clearly a bit preachy. It was, I worried a lot as a parent.
What I have learned from that is the more I worried and the more emphasis I gave to things, it was like feeding a monster in my back pocket, but this monster had grown way out of my pocket and couldn’t fit through the door it was so big, in fact it had taken the roof off the house … and now it was raining.”
It works like this –
We notice there is a speck on the wall, all we see is that spec. We clean our teeth in the morning and all we can see is the spec. We walk or drive to work, and the speck is our full focus; by this time the speck is a lot bigger. All day it’s at the back of our mind, we go to the toilet with it and type the keyboard with it, we do all our tasks and this spec is now as big as a tsunami. By the time we get home, the spec has become a giant monster 1000 miles high, all because we perpetually have our focus on it. It has become a monster of our constant emphasis. Not only have we given the spec two sets of very big legs, a set of very nasty teeth, we have also fed it so much it has the power to eat us alive.
Take away the constant emphasis on the spec/monster and it collapses like putting a pin in a balloon.
All those things we worried about – foof! – they’re gone. This is not to say we ignore or turn a blind eye to concerns, but our constant emphasis on concerns don’t serve us. Another way of putting it is – we need to keep a sense of balance – having a sense of balance makes us steadier and more available for our kids and, on the plus side…we look less crazy-looking as a parent, which is always a good thing.
Keep a look out for that trickster, ‘super giant monster’. That monster kills our sense of humour dead and stops us laughing at the ridiculous and silly things in life. A sense of balance keeps us sane, which is super-handy.
Photo by Hayley Catherine on Unsplash
Further Reading
Audio