Tag: way forward

Experiencing uncertainty

As I reflect upon the past six months, it feels like a period muddled and unfocused. I am actually unable to distinguish what I did. I can, however, reconnect with the feelings of it all. As I look to the next six months, I am already prepared for a period of fog, where moving through space and time without seeing much warrants slowing down, knowing that where I am going or where I have come from is unclear. I shall keep my eyes open for what emerges from the haze, and mostly feel my way forward.

We may be tempted to pull over and wait for the murkiness to clear. We may also look for the taillights of someone in front of us to follow and make our way along the road. Indeed, most of us prefer to see where we are going and keep steadfast in one direction. Yet there are gifts that come with the fog. Sometimes it takes something like fog to slow us down and think. Involuntary inactivity forces us to see beyond what we may look for, and it may even help us see that the fogginess is coming from within. In reality, we cannot see outside ourselves; the source of insight and light usually lies within.

You can continue to move forward cautiously in the months to come, but you cannot predict when the fog will lift. You can wait for guidance and hope for reliable taillights to follow. But you can also learn to listen for signs, harness your intuition and insights, and distinguish the noise around you from your own voice and clarity within. You will find clarity as you look for your next step, but certainty is becoming increasingly illusive. Let it not stop you. Being clear is all you need. Certainty never lived long anyway.

What kind of a parent/leader are you?

What if parenting is not solely, or even fundamentally, about growing up our kids, but rather about growing ourselves up?

I have lived with that question with great affection, looking at my son and feeling utterly grateful for the lessons over many years. I did not yet know when he was little that his playfulness, candor, integrity, and trust were traits I badly needed to re-learn. However, I knew when I saw these traits slowly take backstage, as he was becoming a young adult, that he would have to learn them again, just like me, with his own kids. He knew somehow, as he often said over the past years, that he would need to marry someone who would know how to teach, train, and be the adult because he would most likely be the playmate for his kids.

If we ask most parents what is parenting, they are bound to answer something like: training, mentoring, teaching, passing on to help little ones become adults, essentially to shape those entrusted in their care. This may very well be, but what if this was not the only part of parenting? This is perhaps even the least important part in today’s world, when we badly need to rethink our way forward.

Are you prepared to believe that your kids know things you do not? Are you willing to revisit your childhood and complete with your kids what you could not complete the first time around? What if parenting was a great invitation to rethink your reality and the way forward in your life, as everything is changing around us fast. Are you prepared to look at your children and those of others, as a way to heal what is broken and wounded in yourselves and our society?