I could feel my blood pressure rising, as I sat there feeding oatmeal to my son. He had decided that blowing raspberries with food in your mouth was going to be his MO for the morning. He was having a fantastic time of it. Me, not so much. I’d have to change him and we were running short on time. We’re going to be late for story time at the library, my insides screamed. My sympathetic nervous system, always on high alert, was about ready to make a mountain out of a pile of oatmeal goo.
As we wrapped breakfast, I had to mentally shake myself out of an emergency that I had created. So what if we were late for story time? What if we just didn’t make it? My child wasn’t going to drop in intelligence by missing half an hour of singing and stories. I had to calm down about it. The worst case scenario was that we’d go, have a gander about, maybe take a few books out, sit by the window and watch the world go by. My son is young; everything is currently interesting.
The whole episode made me think of how many of the emergencies we have are truly manufactured. We put arbitrary deadlines on our daily lives, expect people to return our calls right this minute and act like the world is about to come to screeching halt when things don’t respond to us promptly.
I’m so cognizant of passing on this anxiety. These plastic fires, that we stoke. I’ve decided manufactured urgency is simply not going to be the order of the day. I like timeliness, but when life has its own plans, sometimes its best just to go along with it. What’s the worst that can happen? There are movements around getting people to slow down because we are so harried it’s making us all sick. Doctors are now prescribing time outside.
Nothing is urgent, truly. We want and need it to be, to perhaps add some kind of meaning or forward motion to our lives. But it turns out, things simply choose to take their time to unfold.
I ended up not rushing us from breakfast. It wasn’t worth passing on the stress. We did make it story time with the rest of the harried parent-child clusters. Everyone looked exhausted. I’m not sure my son even enjoyed story time at the end, as much as he enjoyed reading a book we took out called I am Calm. Perhaps we both needed it.