Monat: August 2021

We are all children and remain so throughout our lives.

The love of our parents is a prerequisite for us to feel secure in the world. Our parents shape us in the first years of life like no one else.

We cannot decide where we are born and also not whether we wanted to be born. It is a matter of fate or luck and we cannot choose which parents we have. We are born into the lives of our parents.

Life attitudes and values, lifestyle and circumstances format us, so to speak.

I have always had a split relationship with my parents, precisely because of their divorce, and thus with parenthood.

I could not imagine having children. On the one hand, because I am constantly afraid for them, in which world will they live, which challenges will they face?

But also because I am afraid of giving them too much of myself. To transfer my primal fears and mistrust, my doubts and psychoses to them.

Now that I’m a father myself, I have to admit, it’s worse than I expected. The parenting job is the most horrible in the world, with lousy pay and constant over time.

My fears are one thing, but I often fall back on methods of my parents out of nowhere when parenting and it scares me.

No one can prepare you for parenthood and even what kids you get and how they turn out often seems random and a matter of luck. A mixture of genes and peer groups and your own situation in life, a thousand parameters influence the little ones.

I lose my temper way too often and constantly reach my limits. My children seem to love me anyway. This love is the strongest and most gratifying feeling I have experienced so far. My love for them as well. No one can prepare for or anticipate something like this.

I want my children to become free-thinking, independent living, happy people.

I want to give them advice and support and actually just protect them around the clock. But this is not possible and will not do them any good, I have to learn to bring the support and the letting go into a reasonable balance and I have to learn to speak with the children, in their language.

With them, I get the chance to experience my life from a completely new perspective and they teach me more about myself and the world every day than anyone or anything else.

With an open heart and when I am really with them, I see the world in a new way, marveling at seemingly small things, a tree, a bus, a beautiful color, a train, an ice cream.
They live in the now and know no yesterday and no tomorrow. They express their needs immediately. Their default mood is happy unless they are hungry, thirsty, or tired.

As Kahlil Gibran so aptly writes:

„Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.“

That’s what I have to learn.

Poem ‚On Children‘ from The Prophet (Knopf, 1923). This poem is in the public domain.

My first serious confrontation with grief was the death of my grandparents.

Maybe it is like that in many cases when time passes naturally and no early strokes of fate befall us.

At that time this event had shaken me because I had a strong bond with them and I remember thinking at that time ‚best not to take human bonds too seriously, because, in the end, they must end in loss‘.

In fact, this is a core teaching in Buddhism as well, in other words, life is suffering.

What I didn’t understand at the time is that life can still be enjoyed, perhaps even must be enjoyed, and that human bonds are the most important thing there is for us. Only these bonds give our life real meaning.

And so I finally allowed it again, the love. The love for other people, friends, women, my children. Always knowing that a relationship probably has to end one day.

The thing I regret the most is the connection with my father, which broke up in a quarrel and now he is deceased, there is no possibility to revise something or to reconcile. Saying you love each other and then saying goodbye in peace is very important. This regret will definitely haunt me for the rest of my life.

Then there was the loss of a good friend that hit me hard. It came suddenly and for him at a relatively young age some time ago. But even though I miss him every day, I don’t mourn him that much because there was nothing unresolved between us. No conflict and I did not have the impression that he had not lived just one day in the life he wanted, he enjoyed his life. Sure, he could have had many more wonderful years and we could have had many more wonderful times together but I am glad for the time we had.

There can also be mourning about friendships we lost even if death isn’t involved. You lose track of someone, you have a conflict that doesn’t get resolved, you turn to different life paths and don’t see each other anymore. I lost friends along the way which I deeply regret and I’m mourning their loss even if they’re still out there somewhere.

Grief and loss are certainly processed differently in each individual case and there are also strokes of fate in which it is probably not possible. I imagine the loss of my own children and the thought alone must be suppressed, the fear and grief even if such a thing has not happened, is unbearable in the imagination alone.

So it is the acceptance that our lives are fleeting that is so difficult, and even the beautiful moments are not permanent. If life is long enough, the chance of a ‚happy ending‘ dwindles. At the same time, it is the cycle of life and mortality that makes everything so special to us.

Therefore, every moment in the now should be enjoyed and the beautiful and also less beautiful moments should be perceived and accepted as what they are:

Life.

It is hard, it is easy, it is cruel, it is beautiful, it is all that and wants to be lived.