Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘Spirituality’

It was 4pm and I finished packing my presentation after running a full day of professional development for teachers. I taught a group of 40 teachers the importance of touch and planting good and happy seeds in their students’ minds.

As I packed, everyone came to give me a hug. I was pumped and very happy. I was having a good day. An older teacher, who had not spoken much throughout the day, talked to other teachers and smiled to me every time she passed next to me, but did not give me a hug. She was the only one who did not hug me at the end of the day. I tried to tell myself that convincing 39 people we all need 12 hugs a day was good enough, even if I have missed one person. After a long day on my feet and doing my best to stay fully focused, all I wanted was to go to the supermarket, pick Eden up from the bus station and go home.

When everything was inside the car and I started driving, the older teacher came out of the building. I smiled and opened the car window.

“Have I given you a hug?” I asked.

“No, you haven’t”, she said, sounding disappointed.

I turned off the engine, unbuckled my seatbelt, got out of the car and gave her a hug.

Have you ever heard something over and over again from different, unrelated sources and you have said, “Wow, what a coincidence. I read about this yesterday” or “I got an email about this just last week”?

Well, when I get so many “coincidences” like that in a short time, I think the Universe is trying to tell me something.

One particular coincidental chain started a long time ago, when I was a kid. I listened to a “pirate” radio called “The Voice of Peace”, which played one commercial over and over again, saying “Water. Drink only water”. While they still played sponsored commercials for coke and other soft drinks, they ran this one more frequently than anything and did not get paid for it.

I loved the idea of that radio station, which promoted peace, and I loved the fact that they encouraged people to be healthy, unlike other stations that were selling air time to the highest paying advertiser.

When I was 18, I attended a workshop for girls about the world of cosmetics. Our presenter told us that if we wanted to have soft skin (“like a baby’s bum”), we needed to drink plenty of water, regardless of the price of the moisturizer we bought. Well, 3 of us experimented with this and, just like she said, after only a week, everyone commented on our wonderful, glowing skin.

But these things alone did not seem like they were going anywhere yet.

At birth, God gave Adam two simple-looking gray boxes.

God said, “In one box, you will put all the wonderful moments of your life – the pleasures, the joys, the laughter and everything that makes you happy”.

“What about the second box?”

“In the second box, you will put all the moments of pain and sorrow”, God Said to Adam, “All the loneliness, the discomfort, the heartache, the suffering, the tears and the misery”.

Before you start it, parenting seems daunting. You could be in for years of giving up your personal freedoms to one or more creatures who become more and more demanding as they grow older, while you run around trying to satisfy their insatiable appetite for your time and your money. Indeed, without using The Tao of Parenting, this could be the case, but it does not have to be.

If you are like me and like many other people I know, you sometimes ask yourself just how successful you are. Birthdays and New Years are typical opportunities to do this, but there are many other soft moments, when we find ourselves sitting quietly and thinking, “How is my life going?”

Ask any person who has ever had a garage sale and they will tell you that it takes a long time to prepare for one, and sometimes it is hard to say goodbye to some items that you think are close to your heart. Still, in the end, you meet some wonderful people, you make some money and you feel hugely relieved afterwards. You feel fresh, clean, light and free.

Some time ago, we visited our good friend Neil, who is married for the second time and lives far away from his son from the first marriage Nathan. Neil had last seen Nathan 11 years before. He had some Photos of Nathan in an album created by his younger son Ben. When Neil had said goodbye his son and moved to another country, Nathan was just 9 years old.