Re-enactment

The other day, whilst hurringly grocery shopping with my two precious ones mooching behind me, my boy asked me to buy him this little cactus plant.

 

I snarled at him: ‘No!’ trying to get our necessities without calamities. 

(Fellow hustling parents surely get my drift, like trying to get veggies from the refrigerator when one kid is eating all the grapes from the fruit aisle and the other is drinking and spilling milk all over the floor of the shop because of a severe sorry-mom-but-I-REALLY-REALLY-REALLY-had-to-drink-immediately-or-I-would’ve-died-instantly-even-though-I-just-had-juice-5-minutes-ago whilst in the meantime uttering the most lovely exclamations when I try to reprimand them like: ‘FUCK YOU, MOM, I REALLY HATE YOU, MOM,  YOU NEVER LET US HAVE ANYTHING, MOM,…)  

My refusal of his desire to acquire the cactus obviously upset my kid.   

Now, never letting any opportunity go by to expand my spiritual and intellectual horizon (let’s all be like me and fuck things up all the time so you are never NOT learning) I let my son’s disappointment pauze me in my preoccupation of getting us out of the store with groceries and without any fatalities.

I stopped myself for a minute and overthought the spontaneous ‘nay’ I gave my son.

I never thought about questioning the many ideas and reactions which we think are our own until that point…

About how many of our opinions and (pre)conceptions are really, genuinly ours?

That if pedagogical science learns us that the best way to educate our children is to lead by example, than why did I not ask myself earlier: how many of our 'own' feelings and beliefs can we actually call 'ours'...

After all, aren't we all someone’s children ourselves?

Therefore, are we really thinking and experiencing for ourselves or are we just repeating?

I was stressed so I growled as I used to witness my mom, always stressing, always growling. 

I thought I couldn’t give in to my dearest one as I was drilled to learn that kids can not always get what they want.  My mom never gave in to us as kids as we ‘needed to learn we can not always get what we want’.

I’m so desperately trying to heal and change the world by fiercely trying to love the ones next to me, hoping that they, at their turn, will pay it forward to the ones nearby them but what good does it do when I’m letting the ones closest to me see me to continuously growl, to stress, to have feelings of deprivation, to feel negative…  other than to maintain the current trend of global dissatisfaction/unhappiness.   

We take our actions, words and emotions every single day out of a mold made of behaviour, feelings and thinking patterns taught to us by our parents, experienced by us through friends, seen in society….

The same like when I'm seeing people I interact with behave a certain kind of way. 

If I feel hurt by something they do or say, does this upset me because I authentically think it's upsetting or is it just because I've 'learned' that that specific kind of actions or words are defined as wrong.

So I tried to backtrack my earlier feelings, trying to tap into what I, independent of others’ indoctrinations, thought about the situation.

I went to check the price of the little product of nature.  It only costed 2 EURO, so it was not like my son was asking me for a Shenzhen Nongke Orchid of 200,000 USD.

I came to the realisation that my OWN belief is that the path to happiness is the continuous giving in to that what feels good.  To all that what is beneficial to the body, to the mind and healing for our spirit.

Denying my kid something I can more than easily afford, growling at him like we needed to get out of the store like ISIS would enter every minute to kill us all in there, is NOT acting on any of my true and genuine convictions.

So I think that today would be a perfect day to start stripping myself. 

To get stark-naked and undo myself of all the biased opinions I’m aware I have of everything and everyone and to try to unravel the ones I’m still unconscious of.  

And so it has come upon me, the time for some serious self reflection.

The time has come for some serious tabula rasa.

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