Don’t take it to heart
Don’t take it to heart when your efforts are under appreciated. Your investment is long term. The results will come in spurts or show themselves after years go by.
Don’t take it to heart when your children are bored or tell you they hate homeschooling. It’s a feeling, in the moment, shared with you because you are the safe place and the one in charge. Hold space for the feeling. But also hold space for homeschool. Sometimes the expression of frustration will subside as they feel heard and supported. Don’t make big changes after single outbursts. Stick with your plan, but offer compassion, support, and breaks.
Don’t take it to heart when you try your best to apply principles that “work for everyone else” but aren’t working for you. It’s not you. Or rather, it is you—you matter. What works for you? Those principles and practices that ensure peace, progress, and passion. Check in with yourself and look for signs of life. Don’t expect cookie cutter results applying someone else’s practices and principles. Always find your own, or your version of the ones you admire.
Don’t take it to heart when you have a bad day or a bad week or a bad month. We all go through dips and swings into the muddy places. Be good to you. Slow down, take a breath, regroup, start again. If the dips and slides last longer than a month, pay attention. Discover the cause, but do so free of self-loathing or judgment. Solve the puzzle; not the crime. You aren’t bad or wrong, just depleted and banged up.
Don’t take it to heart when the email or forum post stings and zings, pops your bubble and misses the spirit of who you are. Online communication lacks emotional cues and gives too much permission to the expression of harsh feeling. Sip tea, read the comment, delete it or click out. Move on. You have too much to do and too many people to love to give that one invisible person power to disrupt your harmony.
Don’t take it to heart when the progress you counted on doesn’t emerge. You have time. There is always time—time for everything you’ve ever needed to do under the sun. You can’t live as though there is no time. That posture squeezes the joy from living and hurries little people who can’t be hurried and robs learning of its incubation and saturation stages. Be picky. Choose one thing at a time and trust it to teach everything.
Don’t take it to heart when things go wrong, when you feel inadequate, when you are misunderstood, when you can’t find your way. That’s just today, just a moment. It will pass.
The kind of person who takes all these things to heart? A really good person, with a big heart. That’s you.
Be good to you.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Image by Sean and Lauren
