Training Ground - Life
Since tomorrow is the schloppy thing we call Mother’s Day, I thought I’d send out a few thoughts on the ways our own lives offer us opportunities to practice spiritual work.
I would argue that our entire life is a spiritual classroom, but I’m not sure most of us are ready to go there yet, question mark?
In its inception Mother’s Day was actually a great idea. It began as a peace movement. Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870 after the devastation of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. She had had enough of seeing boys and men returning broken from war, or not returning at all. She envisioned Mother’s Day as a time for mothers to unite across nations, to resist sending sons into war, and to perpetuate that idea there be moral leadership rooted in caregiving rather than violence. Terrific ideas. How it devolved into a day to take your mom out to brunch is beyond me, but here we are.
I remember clearly watching my son, Sam, walk away, huge duffle bag over his shoulder, into his freshman dorm at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe. After working odd jobs for two years after high school he was ready for the college experience.
I wasn’t, though. I don’t think I’ve ever been ready to watch my kids leave.
I texted him later to see if he wanted to come back to our rental for a bbq, and he responded “I’m on a catamaran.”
His new life had already begun.
I remember the exact moment Nate pulled out of the driveway and drove away, alone. I can still see his freshman dorm room at Montana State University. Coco and I cried all the way back to Vermont after leaving him there.
Was it good or bad that my boys had chosen colleges thousands of miles from home? At the time I wasn’t sure, but when I went to visit them and they picked me up at the airport and showed me around their town and introduced me to their friends I knew their choices had been chef’s kiss. They knew how to build the infrastructure of a good life, without parental oversight. That’s huge.
Still, seven years after leaving Nate in Montana, after I deposited Coco in Lake Tahoe to live with her brother and work as a nanny for a year, I flew back east, landed in Albany and burst into tears. I didn’t expect to feel what I felt: unsure of who I was without kids in my life. I hadn’t realized just how much of their teenage energy filled my days. Who the hell would I be without them, and for what? I had been raising kids in Vermont for thirty years. What now?
Ugh. That’s the agonizing thing about parenting. You love a person literally to death, you are certain you’d step in front of them to protect them from anything, but you have to release them to the wild at some point. Fully release. Let them fall, let them figure out how to hang a shower curtain, let them feel hungry and lonely. Let them feel the satisfaction of success without you standing on the sidelines clapping.
What mothering, parenting asks of us is the willingness to love someone into their full freedom. It’s kind of a lousy bargain … I will give you everything I have, everything I can, knowing that if this turns out well, you will, indeed should, leave.
It goes against all of our natural impulses to want to cling to love, cling to familiarity, cling to certainty. It runs against every instinct of possession. It requires a generosity that most of us have to practice, consciously, against the grain of our own selfish desires.
It is among the most sacred things we can do.
It’s a lot like gardening. You might have a garden, but you don’t grow anything. You set the conditions. If you over-water or under-water the plant won’t thrive. If you don’t pay attention to bugs, soil, light, failure to thrive. If you hover too much, same problems.
None of it comes naturally, it takes a lot of practice. A mom who loves without grasping is practicing one of the most advanced forms of spiritual attention available to human beings: non-attachment.
She is doing something monks sit in silence for years trying to learn and she is doing it in the middle of ordinary life, in the midst of the daily grind. Go moms!
Our lives are ground zero training ground for spiritual growth. It would be helpful to see it this way rather than as a series of crappy challenges and bad breaks. We’re not victims inside of our own lives, though I’ve seen plenty of people who waste years, a whole lifetime, thinking this way.
You didn’t come here to accumulate stuff, get famous or be rich. Those things are fine, you should do them if you want to, but the real job of being a human is to let life teach you whatever lessons you came here to learn. Your soul wants to evolve, your life is giving you endless opportunities for that to happen.
The wonderful thing about parenthood is that it keeps changing. Just when you thought you lost everything you get to watch your kids become adults. You get to witness their evolution.
There’s a great scene in the movie Lost in Translation where Bill Murray as Bob Harris is describing becoming a parent. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard:
“The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born. Your life, as you know it... is gone. Never to return.
But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.”
Absolute truth, all of them (missing Gretta here).
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO MIŠEL (far left) for receiving her MBA from Duke today! 👩🎓🎉
