Years ago, long before we’d met, my wife’s liberal, atheist friend asked her if she wanted to bring kids into such a cruel world – and if so, why?
My wife’s response, which I learned about years later, was quite stunning.
So much so, that a few years later her friend also decided to have children and I like to think that my wife’s influence had something to do with it.
Rachida put forward the stunningly obvious idea that life is about personal growth and from what she can tell, nothing will make you grow like getting married and having kids. (And, my inner-entrepreneur would argue, building a business from scratch).
And boy, was she right about that.
Every single time your kids do something cray-cray, which, in my estimation, during the summer holidays is approximately every 7 and a half minutes, you have a choice: to lose your head, or to keep your head and drop your ego.
And every time we choose to drop the ego, something wonderful happens: we grow in consciousness, fulfilling the very purpose of our lives.
Here’s how I think it happens:
- Childish-Behavior-Induced event occurs (moaning, whining, melt-downs, whatever.)
- Crazy-Parent thinking and feeling kicks in (Think Homer Simpson’s reaction to Bart: “why I oughta’…”)
- We see the temptation to fall for it (raise our voices, use our bigger bodies to intimidate them into surrender, argue back, shut them down)
- We choose to let that anger-based response go and return to presence and sanity.
- We see the situation more clearly and a better way to respond occurs to us (which saves us from strangling them Homer-Simpson-style)
- The new response usually gives them the attention they’ve been craving and helps them solve the problem
- Everyone goes back to normal
In many ways, this is normal, mundane, everyday parenting. It will probably happen a hundred times during the summer holidays alone. But in the midst of it all, something magical occurred.
Did you catch it?
We had a life-altering insight and barely even noticed.
Our default nafs-based reactionary conditioning pulled us in one direction.
But that pause, that letting go of negativity, and the resulting present-mindedness created just enough space for sanity – and a new thought, a fresh new insight – to enter.
Sure, it doesn’t happen every time.
But every single time it does happen, we increase in consciousness and gain a tiny glimpse of divine wisdom. We take one step closer to enlightenment. One step closer to God.
And our clever little egos think it’s nothing, completely overlook it, distract us with something else to think about, and we carry on as if divine wisdom didn’t just get downloaded into our brains, out of thin air.
This is why we were blessed with children (and partners, and businesses) in the first place. This is the field that the game of life is played on.
No-one gets out of this place alive.
But some people get a lot more (wisdom, insight, conscious growth, knowledge of God, gnosis) out of it than others.
If you want to be one of them, this can’t hurt:
