Their special skill
Children live in the now. They don’t (over)think about things that have already happened, and they definitely don’t care about the future. They want what they want in the now: treats, toys, our attention. They might want to stay, continue what they have been doing, they want you to watch, to see and to play too. If you don’t give in, they probably will flip but just a few minutes and then they laugh again. It’s no coincidence that they transition so easily from loud hysteria to light giggles, or vice versa. They don’t attach, don’t cling to these feelings and emotions, they just enter the next moment, the new “NOW”.
What about us, adults? Can we easily let our negative feelings go?
Mode of Zombie
Mostly we just cannot. We believe that the way kids move so quickly and suddenly from one emotion to another is immature. In contrast, we are so attached to the past that we keep pulling it with us as a heavy iron chain. We hope that with keeping our past in mind we can achieve what we really want in the future.
We – adults – are not really living in the present anymore. Every scene in the moment can easily take us back to the past or make us think about the future. We are taken to the past mostly by feeling hurt, and to the future by wanting to have control over it. Adults want to be more accurate in calculating what, when and how to do, in order to make it right, so then we can be satisfied and happy in the future. We don’t even realize that in the meantime we somehow miss everything. Just running blindly in a mode of Zombie. Constantly. Even though, when we think about it, we know what’s important is happening in the now.
Children know this! It’s no coincidence that they can best irritate us (either positively or negatively). That is why the mission is theirs. They try to wave their flags high, warning us, “SEE THIS, EVERYTHING IS HERE THAT IS NEEDED!”
Our responsibility
“But what if…?”, “We have to think about the future!”, “We can’t live like a giddy-pate, we have a lot of responsibility!”
Right! We have to think about the future but we don’t have to live there. Yes, we are responsible for our children and that is why we need to see what kind of message we are passing to them with this worldview. That is a big enough responsibility!
If we regularly worry about the repetition of the past and work to secure the future, omitting the present, what our child will learn (among other things) is that:
- My existence is little for happiness.
- Happiness must be achieved in the future. It depends on how much I do
- My parents and other people don’t have time to listen to me, see me, understand me.
- My parents are so tense because they want good for me. I’m the reason they’re tense, I’m not good enough.
- I can’t be who I am because it doesn’t seem to be welcomed. I’d better change!
- I am what I do and who others see.
Yes, this is how we grew up too. Saw what we saw from our parents. Maybe we couldn’t complete our mission, a cropper came with it. Perhaps we faded into society and became just as zombies as our parents were. But our children don’t have to do the same.
Learn from the Master
There is no other living creature that can see so many miracles in the little things of nature. A child can admire a withered tree leaf for minutes, chase a dust bunny for hours, repeat jokes all afternoon, and laugh at them over and over again. They know the real miracles are happening in the present. We need to be here with them to notice. We can teach our children many things, but no one can teach us better than them to ENJOY WHAT WE HAVE, WHEN WE HAVE IT. And they want to experience these miracles with us more than anything.
What worries are you carrying from the past? What kind of vision are you trying to stick to?
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