Games that Parents play
One thing that I adore my wife is for her ability to infuse love and caring into seemingly mundane and disciplinary tasks. For example waking up our 7 year old for school at 5.30 in the morning – she does it with such an ease, with a lovely Good Morning!!! in a singing voice, few caresses and lure him to the shower, with warm running water. Being a parent or a manager it is quite easy to revert to authoritarian tactics, everything else is so slow, however for long term sustainability and an engaging relationship, slow is better.
When I was young my parents used to say (even our relatives) about the hardships that parents go through in order to raise kids. Now being a father of a 7 year old and an 8 month old my feelings lean towards the contrary.
Like Khalil Gibran said children came along into existence because of life’s
Longing toward itself, they came through you, they did not come from you, you can house their bodies but you cannot house their souls, they have their own minds, you can try to reach into their world, but you cannot expect them to understand your world.
Parenting is a dubious topic, where parents think they have to condition their offsprings to fit into the social and cultural structures they know. This may have been relevant for the agrarian societies where children grew up and resided in the communities that their parents belonged to. Now you have no clue, where your offsprings are planning to sprinkle the pollens of their life. Where they will float into, what kind of experiences they will encounter, what solutions they will discover, what are the neural connections unknown to you that they will nurture and develop into skill sets and what ways they will engage an unknown world with their love for change, with their love for innovation, with their love for art and the ease at which they will manoeuvre the complexities that intimidate you. So when you get asked what legacy will you leave for your children, it is better to emphasise the importance of exercising an ‘empty cup’ mentality, so that they never approach life with pre-conceived notions, and always carry the sense of wonder and curiosity.
Many of us have cut off our emotional resonance to the external world at an early age following some crippling experiences in our lives. Some of us identify that and seek medical help, some of us search for solutions within ourselves through increased awareness and some of us search for a miracle to dawn on us. Whatever be our inclinations , kids bring a difference to our world healing our souls as part of a grand design.They are able to elicit emotional connectedness from us effortlessly through non verbal communication and engage us to lose ourselves in a world of “we”
Choosing a life centred around a kid and then choosing to build a family to accommodate that choice was probably not an act of love or search for meaning, it was a gift seeking a recipient and I was the recipient. The non verbal communications with our child without any ambition to teach him the world of grown ups, but to immerse ourselves in their world of endless possibilities, where realities and dreams are intertwined, where there is no craving to fit the world into structures that we know, for there is no knowledge. There is only wonder. As there is no language, there is no left brain, only right brain which was subdued by years of school and college seeking to release itself from the clutches of conformity to stimulate hitherto unknown neural activities and nurture the mind into a more integrated and mature entity, with increased awareness and compassion.
When you become a parent and start celebrating the early years of your kid, suddenly you feel a part of you becoming tender and alive in ways that you have not known before, a disconnect from the sense of need and a connection to the sense to give, energy to go on without feeling tired and an anchor to the soul directing the decisions you make in life, encapsulating a wider sense of being, connecting yourself to the community and the world, you seldom cared about before.
Life takes us through complete acts of self renewal, in ways we never thought possible and when you feel connected to a possibility, which manifests itself through you, you feel gratitude for being chosen as a medium and humbled, for there is no you, only a grand design.
