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I wish I had just kept quiet
Autumn is my favourite season, and I feel like the crisp air and crunchy leaves almost challenge me to get honest and reflective so that I can shed what no longer serves.
This Autumn, I’m asking myself if I can shed my need to be right.
You know those moments where you say something to someone important to you and afterwards wish you’d just kept your mouth shut?
I started off today having a yucky experience with one of my daughters, the details of which I’m not going to share, but it definitely had a strong flavour of me thinking I was right.
In that moment, as I stood washing dishes, I forgot that…
Her life is hers, and she can learn from what happens.
My job is to love her fiercely. And to be respectful of boundaries – my own and hers.
I can offer my guidance but it’s up to her if she wants to receive it.
She is a precious soul and it’s my privilege to have brought her into this world and to be her mum.
She is not my project.
At the deepest level, we are not separate.
My true nature (and hers too of course) is love.
At the time I couldn’t see any of that. It was clouded over by thoughts that looked oh so real and urgent.
I wasn’t open to seeing all the ways in which the very thing that I was finding triggering is something that I do as well!
Whatever it is we’re finding triggering in another person, we have an equivalent. It really wouldn’t take much scrutiny to find out what the equivalent is, either in real time today or something that’s been there for us in the past.
And as I woke up to this afterwards and felt that sinking “I wish I had just kept quiet” sensation in the pit of my stomach, I remembered a passage that was pinned on our fridge door for a number of years. Today it feels more true than ever.
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”
From "On Children" in "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
I could gladly feel the discomfort of staying quiet when it feels oh so urgent and important to speak.
I can do that, when I remember.
I can love myself anyway when I don’t.
Is there anything you’d like to shed, in order to feel more love this Autumn? And would you share this article with a parent who needs to hear it?
