No such thing...

I am moved to tears by the quote: "There's no such thing as other people's children".

I have fantasies of assigning myself some sort of "common curriculum" to revisit each year.  The specifics tend to vary, but always include something by Brene Brown, the Heath brothers (am currently obsessed with "The Power of Moments"), Bryan Stevenson and Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" -- ideally with the latter two always paired together.

Tyler and I had a visioning weekend date this past weekend.  We packed up our bags (and Elliot!) for a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Cascades... and for the ~five hour drive there and back, we talked about our hopes and dreams and life visions.  While it was energizing and inspiring, there was also one element that really nagged us... For the first time in our adult lives, we couldn't easily state what we stood for.  We tried to rationalize it (we have a baby now -- don't we stand for him?) and stated what seemed to be vague generalities (we stand for equality but when was the last time we actually took a stand for this, as in a verb?)  It was raw and truthful and brutally honest. 

And our late-twenty-something-old selves would be horrified (we did meet in India, convinced in our individual roles in changing the world).

One of my recent learnings as a coach is the capacity to hold space for inquiries.  Big questions that are too important to shrug off and deserve an answer.  So what is it, truly, that I stand for?

If I'm honest with myself, I still don't know what I truly take a stand for.  As in, move to the other side of the world, cast aside comforts, and truly take a stand for.  Not that necessarily has to happen, but it's a good litmus test for me, since, well, I've done that before.

But what I feel deepest about right now, what truly calls to me and sets my soul on fire is this notion that Marianne Williamson enunciates so well: "The love that will save the world is a love that cares as much about other people's children as we care about our own."  It goes back to the quote that stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it: "There's no such thing as other people's children."

There's this perspective that we naturally get more selfish in our 30s and 40s.  What's that quote? -- "If you're not a socialist in your 20s, you've got no heart.  If you're not a capitalist in your 40s, you've got no head."  But what if being selfish isn't a bad thing?

What if, as my spiritual teacher says, the secret to making this world a better place is to be selfish -- to extend our circle of what's OURS as wide as possible.  Not just taking care of my house, but my neighborhood, and my country and my world??  And extending this out even to people... not just taking care of my child but expanding my view of who I consider my children.  Living in South Korea, I always found it jarring to travel and see homeless people -- there are just so few even in the enormous metropolis of Seoul.  Which is why when I saw homeless children and gypsies sleeping on thrown out mattresses on the sidewalks of Paris, I couldn't get the images out of my head.  I was pregnant then, and I just kept thinking about my child (who we called "Gracy" at the time) sleeping out on the sidewalk.  And that's selfish, right? -- because I was actually thinking about him when there were actual real children snuggled up against their mother and sleeping on the sidewalk.  But that's exactly my point.  Something powerful happens when we use our "selfishness" for good.  When we see families down on their luck and know that the only thing separating us from them is the good luck of being born to the families we were born into, in the country we were born into, and all the good fortune that affords us.  When we blink and we think about, maybe, despite all the love and enormous privileges we have, maybe one day he'll be sleeping on the sidewalk.  Or if that's just too hard to believe, maybe something will happen to me and he'll be motherless for part of his childhood.  And in my selfishness, I hope others will watch out for them.  And so in that same selfishness, I want to watch out for other children.

I didn't do anything that night in Paris, but I still can picture them - brother and sister snuggled up with their mother on the sidewalk as people (including us) walked merrily along.  And I still don't know what exactly I could do.  

But in the process of writing this post and getting everything down on paper, I think I just found what I stand for...