Creating Healthy Stories
Laying the foundation for a healthy life requires creating healthy stories.
When we are around children, we experience curiosity and awe about the simple things in life. Yesterday, I observed a child who was inquisitive but his parents slowly got increasingly irritated by his questions. And not only shut him down but literally ignored him. He was relentless. They were exhausted and visibly annoyed as they rolled their eyes and shrugged their shoulders.
And right in front of me a whole story played out. What if this is how their questions were treated when they were young? Maybe the adults around them ignored their questions? What if this same story has been playing out for thousands of years?
What if we simply don’t know how to create healthy stories? And maybe we can when we feel that it’s ok to say, “I don’t know” instead of ignoring questions? Maybe it’s healthy to be curious and not always know everything?
Whose Story Are We Living?
Many of us are conditioned to believe that life is about being happy. This is why we focus on avoiding anything that causes pain, a pursuit of being the best, having more, knowing more and protecting all of it. We are told to get through life the best we can by making the fewest mistakes, and not failing. This, in a nutshell, is an accepted way life is to be experienced in the “existing paradigm.”
But what if we were gifted with the opportunity to break from the original story and create healthy stories?
And when we do, we no longer accept the rigid structures and organized ways of being around us. We understand we have an opportunity to choose our own way of living and being in the world. We tell our children that we simply don’t know when their questions stump us. Maybe we also find a way to co-create healthy stories with them by tapping into our imagination and playing?
Maybe this is how we make sense of things together? Simply by talking without a pre-determined outcome. And we could become aware that we don’t always have to take ourselves too seriously?