It’s a rainy Thursday morning, and my almost four year old and I are both slow moving. Thursday is our slow moving day. It is sandwiched between the busy of school days and the busy of life days.
He wrestles with his carseat and alerts me that it is too tangled. I gently turn and unravel it for him, and say: “Do you know why I could do that?”
“Yes,” he says. “You have patience.”
Honestly, I am shocked because it is the one virtue I am so low on I named my dog, patience, Ahonui, in Hawaiian.
“Yes,” I respond as a good parent does, rising to the character my son has in me.
“Do you know where to get more patience? I think I need more,” I communicate the truth of my feelings.
“No.”
“Oh, do you have patience?” I ask him.
“No,” he says without a hitch.
We tumble on into a slow and loving day of toddler-sized adventures paced with the autumnal turning pace. I think this is why he so quietly tucked himself in a few hours later and took a rest. I sat and wanted to accomplish so much in those resting moments, then I thought: What if I too stayed slow? What if (since you called it a resting day, I kept my promise to myself, so that when he arose we were both, actually rested).
I sat next to my sleeping child and remember these moments are leaving. He will turn four soon and by next year, at the rate he is going, this intimate pace will be less and less. I agree with myself to go slow, too. So when he arises, I am still on his cadence.
I turn towards a stack that need tidying, and one topples open. It is a booklet on Kundalini practices and it open to page 58, titled: Releasing Childhood Anger.
Life can be like.
One thing I love about an 11 minute kundalini meditation is I never think I can finish it, and then when I cross the threshold of no-turning-back and complete it, the purity of fortitude is there.
Instead of judging or making meaning, I do the meditation. Because there is not some large childhood story that I have been sitting with. Rather I have been sitting with my own child’s story and a bit more of my future. Future proves past. The Spiral gives way to forward motion. I give my body permission, and the experience is a good one. It is interesting to me that the crux of the meditation is breathing in through clenched teeth and exhaling out of your nose.
In the middle of the meditation my mind turned away from my personal frustration (although I was still not articulating memories, rather just intending expansive permission for my body), and thought of the inadvertent and also obvious frustration my own child undoubtedly has accrued, and just when I went to judge myself, I thought this: If I can clear my own self, forty years later, we can clear his residue now, and I felt so much lighter.
This too is how life is.
In so much I mean this, there is a grand patience to be had when we realize our inevitable floundering and the infinite possibilities of grace and recalibration, not because you deserve it, not because you perform for it, but because it is a law of the universe and one of the threads that run through our lives. It is simply waiting for you to open to it.
Be well,
Kate