Seeking bright things instead of dark
For months now I have been swimming in fear. Or perhaps a better description would be wallowing in worry, because swimming implies movement and possibly gracefulness. I don’t feel like I’ve moved at all. I’m still stuck in the same emotional morass. Some of the worries have revolved around business or financial fears, but mostly I have worried over the children. These worries have worn tracks in my brain so deep that it is hard for me to believe that my kids could travel by any other path than the one I fear most. Then I spend emotional energy trying to figure out how I can heave them out of this dangerous path. I’ve also spent time feeling guilty because I’ve been more worried about one child than another, as if the lack of worry somehow demonstrated a lack of love.
I’m tired of wallowing. I want to wash off and do something else with my mental energies. I’ve devised a means by which I can consciously re-train my mind into new habits. I intend to spend some focused time each day thinking of qualities that my children already possess which are opposite of my fears for them. (The “already posses” is critical here. This is not about me creating, but about me recognizing.) I will try to find specific actions made by the child within the prior 24 hours which demonstrate those qualities. For example: If I worry that a child will cave to negative peer pressure and bullying, I will counter the fear by remembering the rainbow socks she wore even though some other kids thought they were odd. I will follow that up by remembering how my daughter did not care about other opinions because the socks made her happy.
This process will teach me to look for and witness the bright, wonderful, and strong things about each of my children. It will teach me why I don’t need to be so worried. A natural effect of me noticing the good qualities will be that I react more to the good things. This isn’t part of my conscious and careful plan, I always react to what I see, I just intend to notice different things. I believe that my increased response to positive things will in turn have an effect on my kids. Children thrive on attention and response. They instinctively increase behaviors which earn them attention and responses. My reactions to the strong, bright, good qualities that they have will encourage them to grow in those ways–just as a seedling turns toward the light.
Their growth will be a happy side-effect, but it is not the point. My focus is on changing me, not them. I’ve been exactly backward in my thoughts lately. I was racing around a maze, trying to brick up all the dark alleys. Instead I should have been working on making the bright and beautiful paths easy to find and follow. I do that by traveling them myself. In the end my children must make their own choices. They will not always make the choices I wish they would. But I need to feed my trust in who they are so that I can watch and love without so much fear.