The dance of parenting
To parent is a constant dance with surprise, delight and frustration.
This little being comes with their own pattern, their own flow state.
Easy would have our infant conform to our schedule, our time line.
But feeding, sleeping, walking and speaking do not occur according to our schedule.
The harder we impose our order and structure on a infant, the more we suppress their ability for creativity. The more we get frustrated with their time line, the more we create a false pressure of unable-to-ever-be-met expectations.
This is not to say that we provide zero structure, for all of us need clear boundaries and a structure to hold the shape and integrity of our lives.
The dance lives between structure and emergence.
To be comfortable with the constancy of change and delight, while being held in the tension of boundaries and structural support, this is the dance of parenting.
This too is the dance of stewardship, of any human partnering.
To yield, yet to remain solid and strong.
In Syntropic World we call this tensegrity…the marriage of tension and integrity, tension and compression.
To be constantly in the conversation of how to live this dance is to be constantly in the conversation of how to dance with life.
Photo taken February 15th 2021
