I took a break from studying for most of today to spend some time with my six-year-old daughter and to reflect on several thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of days. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about human connection and what it means to us.
When we are not connected with other people, we are not happy and we are not functioning in a healthy way. I believe that our poor ways of dealing with our own vulnerability prevent us from connecting with our truest selves and with others—and with something bigger than ourselves and others—in deep and meaningful ways.
Rather than allowing ourselves to feel vulnerable, which also allows us to feel joyful, creative and truly free, we find ways of numbing ourselves and ways of trying to attain some kind of invulnerable perfection for ourselves and for our children.
In her recent TED Talk, Brene Brown said, “Our job is not to see our perfect child and try to keep them perfect, to get them accepted in Yale by 7th grade; our job is to say you’re imperfect and you’re hard-wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. That’s our job. Show me a generation of kids who are raised like that and I think we’ll see an end to some of the problems we’re seeing today.”
As I spent time with my daughter today, I thought about these words. I do know both of us (and all of us) are imperfect and vulnerable. That’s what human beings are. We can start from that place of imperfection and vulnerability, or we can pretend we’re something else and just wait for the façade to come crashing down one day, as it surely will. It made a big difference to me today to think that my main job as a parent is to deliver that message of worthiness of love and belonging to my child (and to me).. I can do that. I need reminders, but I can do that.
There is something special about children, but it’s not perfection, at least not in an adult sense of the word (without flaw or fault). Rather that something special is the ability to approach the world with creative faculties operating at full bore, unimpeded by expectations or shame or fear of failure. Children hear, they see, they create, they are. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
In 1971, R. Buckminster Fuller met with the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi to talk about human potential and the relationship between human knowing and the design of the universe. Fuller talked about special faculties that children exhibit but “lose very quickly due to the misunderstanding of the life experience by their elders who, in fear, think their children are going to experience pain that they have experienced, and tend to guide their children into ways that disconnect the switchboard of extraordinary connections with extraordinary faculties which we all do have.”
Out of concern about the vulnerability that we fear as adults, we think we’re protecting our children by moving them away from the very thing that we ourselves need to be moving toward—the ability to connect to the broader world directly and without self-generated anxiety and without boxing ourselves in with ever narrower expectations.
I was thinking about these things today as I watched the movie “Akeelah and the Bee” (which, I admit, was a school assignment) with my daughter. The movie featured an extended quote from Marianne Williamson, which, in part, reads as follows: “We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
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| Note from Ella, who lost her first tooth today, to the tooth fairy. |
This year I am going to try to allow myself to be vulnerable and in so doing experience real pain and real joy—not the worries about potential pain that my mind generates, which, in fact, precludes real joy. I am going to strive to be my most authentic self, to shine and to encourage my daughter and others around me to shine as they were meant to. And, with any luck, we will all watch that light grow.
May it be so.
