friends

Where We Are, revisited

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

Mid Life. Crisis?

Written originally a year ago, this post seemed worth revisiting after a weekend away with old friends……..

Lots of my peers are wrestling with relocating their lives. There is frequent talk of “making a change,” and often this manifests itself in a laundry list of other places they and their families could live.

Looking for better schools for children; more variety in dining; more diversity in neighborhood; a change in commute; a change in climate; a new house; a more challenging job. The list is familiar and endless.

Pawing the ground at middle age is hardly new territory. The stereotype of the midlife crisis is not positive to say the least; but there is a strange degree of beauty in the moment. I like to believe that change is always available, that what we lose little by little is the will to make it. Midlife wrestling with where we are and where we want to go has an air of Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Where it can go wrong is usually two-fold. One, we repress our real feelings and needs for so long that when our conscience can’t manage anymore the backlash is a destructive taking of all our unmet needs we’ve left untended for years. Two, there is a lack of clarity about what it is that is really unsatisfactory.

Is it REALLY that we don’t have enough of this, that, or the other thing in the place where we are, physically? Or is it that we don’t have enough in other places where we are, like our relationships or our careers?  Here’s wishing all of us a good place to be today.

Everybody Crying Together

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

Very young children express their feelings and observations with such raw honesty and unfiltered emotion, if we truly listen and are willing to hear we can connect our clouded minds to some amazing things.

Compassion means shared suffering, not simply feeling sorry for someone else.

At my daughter’s play date with one of her closest companions last week a bit of a classic two-year-old confusion erupted.  Her friend happily asked her mother to read books to all of us.  Then she picked up one of my child’s favorite books, and my child reached for it and started flipping through the pages.  Her friend tried to take it back, there was resistance, then frustration, then protest, then crying.  Lots of crying and wailing and heart-rending distress ensued.

I watched my daughter’s eyes shoot back and forth to her friend and the two mothers in the room.  She wasn’t about to give up her book, but she wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was, either.  I saw her struggle to understand, and then by choice join the crying.  The somewhat amusing thing was she still didn’t seem to know why her friend was upset, but she was going to cry because her friend was crying. 

The words she said were, “Everybody crying together……….everybody crying together…….”

We mothers knew we had to help change the channel quickly, if for no other reason than we were about to start laughing and we didn’t want to throw fuel on the tiny meltdown cases in our care.  We whisked them up and went to another room for another activity, and all was well in very short order.  (I recall chocolate also was administered.)

When I did some searching on “crying together” it suggested that we cry together fairly easily when we are happy, and not easily but often when grieving a shared loss.  I wonder how often we cry together to express compassion.

Compassion (from Latin: “co-suffering”) is a virtue—one in which the emotional capacities of empathy and sympathy (for the suffering of others) are regarded as a part of love itself, and a cornerstone of greater social interconnectedness and humanism—foundational to the highest principles in philosophy, society, and personhood.

Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”  Forgotten.  Perhaps we are born knowing, and we spend a lifetime forgetting.

I’m sure someone with a degree in child development or some related psychology field can explain to me why what I saw was just a toddler tantrum; unfortunately I can’t hear you, I’m too busy listening to a child and making a pledge to be less concerned with why those I care about are upset, and more focused on being present with them when they are.

(The beautiful image used in this post is from Children: The World Affairs Blog Network and the entire post can be viewed at http://children.foreignpolicyblogs.com/page/81/.)