in AND out breath
I am active by nature. My fire pushes me to do stuff and I get a lot done. Letting my being quieten is a bit harder, especially with children. Children seem to always be on the move and there always seems to be something I need to take care of. In the past I have felt like I need to keep them stimulated, busy, shifting focus and activity. It is exhausting for me. And I realise more and more, it is bad for them. Hence my new mantra: in AND out breath.
It was inspired by some reading I have been doing on Waldorf education. But the concept sits in every spiritual or religious offering. Because doing anything soulful or creative requires 'not doing'. Anytime we move past looking at things literally, we get symbolic, and that is where the out breath takes us. In that land things slow down, goal orientation is less than optimal: you can find mushrooms hidden under pine needles when you weren't looking, or pick up the needles and put them through a hole in the fence again and again; a sun beam becomes magnificent, as it is comes out from beneath a cloud and hits your back. It feels so good to pause. And to get that feeling you have to stop, just be there, without a hurry.
The concept applied to kids is all about letting very active moments be followed by some down time. Because my eyes were open to it, I started noticing how after we would come back from our afternoon adventure, which was usually of high activity at the beach or playground, the children would very happily play by themselves. Ruya would talk to her dolls, quietly moving through a story, slow and reflective. Aziz would work with some gadget he found, happy to sit, happy to stare into space sometimes. Sometimes Aziz will just lie down on his tummy and check out the scene, or Ruya will make a tent and go hide for a while. They are breathing out, letting all that had come into their experience incubate, so they could chew it over and digest it all properly.
The interesting thing about incubation is that it lets you keep from finishing something. You ponder, reflect, simmer on, sit with whatever process you have been working on. And doing that, keeping it unfinished, is the best way to innovate. Not only because you might come across an insight, but because letting the unfinished sit is the best motivator to getting back into the task with gusto. If you want to avoid procrastination, don't complete what you started. Leave it hanging. Let your breath out for a while. The desire to return will burn and when you do it will be with a new lens.
So letting my children incubate means they get to do what they do best, innovate, and put together the pieces of what went on before. It also lets me breathe and experience stuff with them that rejuvenates my soul. Like just sitting and cuddling for a while.
The way this is starting to look in my day is I am allowing for more unstructured time, when we don't do anything really. There is no activity or focus. It is just us rolling around together. And I am valuing it as much as when we are so called doing something. When there has been lots of activity I have started to consciously make us all breathe out, so we slow down a bit. It has also meant that the kind of stuff we do has more melody, we shift from running around to sitting and painting watercolours, from exploring the forest to chilling out on the deck and looking at the trees, from building big sand castles to watching the waves with a snack, from sweeping the deck to sitting and reading books together. It happens naturally, and a lot smoother now that I am not holding my breath in as much.
In one of those out breaths I pondered what makes me keep the breath in? Guilt is the answer so far. A guilt that I am not doing something I should be, and not doing something more constructive. Because that is where value has been placed, in the work we do, in how we introduce ourselves - what is your name and what do you do - in the checklist we write and the way we decide on the worth of the day. It is a strange affliction and dangerous for kids. Already they get homework and after school activities way too early, much too much, and it is taking away what they really need to do, which is to play. Because play is where the creativity, the brilliance, is going to come from. Doing less always leads to doing more and doing it better.
Luckily there is a very easy tonic for the malaise of forgetting to breathe out: nature. It is free, it is available and it is always unfinished.
