Posts Tagged ‘coming home’

Learning from our children

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

If you are a parent then I’m sure that you will agree that we learn as much from them as ever we teach them.  My eldest has finished an intense 3 year degree and has just come home to us.  Obviously there was a lot of late night, cramming and adrenalin fuelled tension leading up to the end of term.  So it isn’t surprising that she is feeling very tired.  However, I think that her weariness goes deeper.

When we leave behind one phase of life and are hanging around in Life’s Waiting Room, profound tiredness is a common response.  It comes partially from the need to recharge and partially from the rawness of the feelings, and we retreat into this sleepy place.  The need to re-energise our system is valuable, but fear can trap us in this place and tell us that we are too tired to come out and face our future!  There is wisdom in the saying “Feel the Fear.. and do it anyway!” 

If you, or a loved one, find yourself trapped in a sleepy place, you need to find that gentle balance between sympathy and challenge.  In the end, the mother bird calls her chick from the nest.

“The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise”   Alden Nowlan

 

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Coming Home & the Middle Way

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

I find it odd that no matter how nice a time one has had travelling, coming home always feels like a good thing, and no matter how smooth the travel, one is always tired when one arrives back. So it is not really surprising to find Family Cooke feeling a little tired, and struggling to get our lives back into some semblance of order once more. Bags to be unpacked, washing to be done, mail to de dealt with and many other tasks to be seen to.

I find myself struggling to find the middle way between rushing like a mad thing to get back into control of my life & my home, and trying to hang onto a little of the holiday spirit and chill a bit longer. It seems so often in life that the middle way is the right path to tread and yet we so often struggle to walk it. The Buddhists have a whole philosophy about this1 but I don’t think that makes it any easier. Thinking back to some of the family squabbles that cause the usual amount of friction & flame, they would be so much less if all of us could be a little less attached to being right and justifying our actions and feelings.

Change can only start when we are prepared to move on, and if necessary, be wrong. After all if we were perfect, then any change would be for the worst, and we couldn’t allow that could we? I truly believe in our ability to grow and become more than we are now, so perhaps today is a good day to start seeing a few more mistakes and misjudgements that I make…

“Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” George Soros

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