Tag: life

Whose expectations?

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My husband and I are what we would like to call low-maintenance. We enjoy holidays and special occasions, but we don’t feel like we need to make what we call a ‘big fuss’ out of them to enjoy our time. (I sometimes suspect it is more laziness than low-maintenance, but who cares as long as we both are happy?).

The challenge to this attitude came almost twelve years ago when our youngest daughter was born. She has high expectations, especially for birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Norway’s national day. I understand and I try to balance between complying to her wishes and keeping things to what I think is reasonable both when it comes to our economy, the environment and our energy.

During the last few years, as she is getting older, I am trying to be more sporty and supportive when she has big ideas trying to encourage her to take some of the responsibility to run them through. She doesn’t always only think about herself, she also plans how to surprise friends or her siblings for their birthdays, which I think is a nice way to show that she cares.

The interesting part is that, often the more I agree, the more she gets things her way the more she wants. As a mum, I am trying to figure out whether this is good or not. I don’t want to kill her personality, but at the same time, I feel I have to remind her about how important it is to focus on the positive and be thankful for what we have instead of focusing on what we feel we lack.

Like today, for example. It is Norway’s national day, and it is a BIG deal for children. Usually, there is a big parade downtown where all schools take part, and many celebrations with friends and family throughout the day. Because of the pandemic, the last two years, the parade has been cancelled for most students, and the celebrations have been restricted.

Traditionally, our little family eats dinner with a couple of friends and their son who are like part of our extended family, so my husband and I were happy we could keep this plan. My youngest had, of course, other plans. She decided to plan a picnic with her classmates, since it is allowed to meet outdoors in bigger groups if one keeps distance, especially if it is part of your daily cohort.

Yesterday evening, we baked cookies and muffins for the picnic, and this morning, I agreed to follow her to the park for a couple of hours. The weather was decent, and most of her classmates showed up. They played games, ate their lunch, and had what seemed like fun from where I was standing chatting with the other parents.

When it was time to leave, we all picked our stuff up, said goodbye and the girls and I walked to the bus stop. On the way, my youngest told me that one of her classmates had ice cream for breakfast, and that he is allowed to eat as many ice creams as he wants all day today. We have a daughter with PWS, so this kind of attitude towards food is not what we want to encourage at home. So, I said that I didn’t feel one needs to eat ten ice creams to have a good day. This was enough for her to be angry for the rest of the trip home and for a long while.

I must say that I find this very challenging, and I am working very hard with myself not to lecture her every time it happens. I feel that she knows what I stand for, she is allowed to disagree, but I can’t help but thinking that she is being ungrateful, and that my role as a mum is to teach her to be grateful.

Or, is it? One thing is her attitude, and the other is how I interpret it and transform it into my problem. “I have complied to this and that, and she’s still not satisfied?!”. Aha! The ego, comes through. I think. And I love it because this kind of situation teaches me over and over again what I can summarise into three main points:

  1. Be clear about what I stand for and act accordingly.
  2. Never do something with the attitude of ‘sacrifice’. Better say clearly ‘no’ and go through the unpleasant moment than to say ‘yes’ without meaning it and going into the martyr role when I don’t get a positive response for my ‘efforts’.
  3. Good enough is good enough and let other people’s expectations (even my sweet daughter’s) be their own problem.

The good thing is that, like many kids her age, after some time being back home and playing some board games before leaving for our dinner party, she had already forgotten her ‘disillusion’.

Before going to bed today, she said: It was a fun day mamma. I didn’t think it would be because of the pandemic, but it was.

My little cute teacher. Good lesson to remember as I am dreading a meeting tomorrow where I feel I will be confronted to the exact same problem. Expectations vs the reality of what I can provide. May I be wise enough to remember today while I’m in the middle of it.

PS I do talk with her from time to time about how we create the world around us by choosing where we want to focus our attention.

Thinking about life and death

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One of my colleagues lost a very young family member this week. A young woman who just had started studying at University. I can’t even imagine the pain and sorrow this has caused for my colleague and her family. Some of my first thoughts ware the usual in this kind of situations ‘so young, with her whole life ahead of her, why does this happen to young, kind people?’, and so on.

Let’s face it, death is the only thing in life that we are guaranteed will some day reach us. Death is part of life. We don’t know when we are going to die and we don’t know how we are going to die, but we know we are going to die. It seems random who dies when. Some die young, some escape death in incredible situations, others die in the must absurd situations.

When we are faced with death, we immediately think about life. We start reflecting on what kind of life is worth living.

There are, of course, different answers to this question, and we often have a tendency to think that we are missing out on something and that in order to have a meaningful life, we should be doing ‘something else’, ‘something bigger’, ‘something more spectacular’. But what if, living a meaningful life means living exactly the life we are living, only intentionally, with awareness? Mindfully.

My idea of a meaningful life might not be your idea of a meaningful life, but just make sure that you don’t go chasing impossibles because you feel you don’t live enough. Maybe, the secret is in the beauty of now and the feeling and attitude we bring to it. I keep going back to the same over and over again: clarity, calmness, love and trust. Don’t wait until you can do something ‘special’ to believe that you are leaving a meaningful life. Start with yourself, get to know yourself, be kind and patient and make time every day to nurture yourself. Sleep enough, eat well, rest, and know your strengths and weaknesses so do your part the best you can. Then, look around and notice those around you. Show them that you notice them. Whether it is your family, your colleagues or just a random person.

Be grateful for the small and the big things, for the good and exciting and for the challenging. Gratitude expands our hearts and allows us to develop humbleness. Humbleness teaches us to appreciate simplicity, and this way, life feels meaningful no matter where we are and what we are doing.

About cats, cars and life in general

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It all started today when while I was waiting for my kids outside school, I saw a message in my neighbourhood’s common message platform that a cat had been run over on one of the streets near our place. My heart stopped as our young cat has just started to dare to be outside during the day while we’re at work and school.

I scrolled down to read the comments to see if more detail was given, and I was relieved to find out that the description of the cat didn’t match our cat, followed by a feeling of remorse for feeling so relieved. I felt sad for the cat and its owners, and I thought about how this kind of painful things seem to often happen to others, until one day, they happen to ourselves.

This incident brought me back to thoughts I’ve been having lately. Death is the most certain thing about life, and it fascinates me how much we try to avoid it until one day, we can’t avoid it anymore. We are so afraid of it, yet, it is the only thing we are guaranteed will happen to each and everyone of us one day.

I personally try not to think much about it, especially when it comes to my loved ones, and I must confess that I just pray that the day it hits me, I will have the strength to see through the darkness of pain and loss.

The good thing about thinking about death is that it really helps us see things with perspective. It reminds us that everything in this world is in constant change, and that we should strive to live a meaningful life, we should strive to see the beauty in every moment and be ready to let go and adapt and adjust and accept change.

With these thoughts in my mind and after eating dinner, I got a backpack ready with my journal, a bottle of water, some extra clothes and my yoga mat. My son has swimming lessons on Fridays, and I had planned to go for a walk in the woods while he swims, find a nice hidden spot, do some yoga asana, and some journaling. I might even lie down and read my book if the weather permits, I thought.

We were half way to the swimming lessons when my car started to complain. It started making weird noises and a warning light symbol started blinking on the dashboard. We were in the middle of the highway, and the car seemed to be doing ok, so we just continued, but right before arriving, my car decided it was enough. We had to stop.

My son walked the last few hundred meters to the swimming pool while I tried to figure out what to do. First of all, it was learning experience to know where to call for help, to look into the car’s manual to understand what this light symbol means, and to google it while I waited for the tow truck.

Then the thoughts started to fly: what are we going to do? It is Friday, we will have to wait until Monday to get the mechanic to see it. We have so many things to do during the weekend! What if it is super expensive to repair? and so on.

The worries didn’t last long, because on a Friday evening, everything seems so easy. Nowhere to hurry to, nothing to have ready for the next morning. My son could get a lift home from one of his swimming peers. I can sit and wait for the tow truck in the car. Luckily, it is not Winter, so we can bike, walk and use public transportation until the car gets fixed… or not.

We’ve been talking for a while about how we could use public transportation more often. Especially the kids and I to get to school. We’ve been also playing with the idea of not owning a car anymore. Or getting a little electric car and use it only for long distances that are too difficult to cover in a practical way in everyday life inside the city. But as with most changes, when you’re in your comfort zone, you don’t really run to make them.

So, what is my point with this text? Not much, only that we can put most of life’s issues in perspective. That what my dad used to say is so true “Everything has a solution except for death”. That it is now we get to live our lives as they are because one day we are here and the next one we are not.

What do you see?

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When I was in my early twenties, I lived in France in a student city near the northwest coast.  During four years, my main means of transportation was the tramway.

I moved away from France, got married and had children. Some years after my youngest child was born, I took a housewife vacation to visit old friends in France. I remember so well taking the tramway the first day and being puzzled by the number of kids and young couples with strollers in the tram. I did wonder for a little while if the city had changed that much from having many students to having many young couples with small children…what happened?

I had changed! Not the city. I was now mum to three small kids, and my focus in life was completely different from when I used to take the tram back in my uni years. This really amused me back then. There most probably were children and strollers in the tram when I was a student, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I was living in a completely different world.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot about how we create our reality through our mind. Whatever it is that occupies our mind influences what we see around us.  We tend to see what we are looking for.

Our perceptions can influence the way we experience the world at different levels. My story about France talks about what was occupying my mind at two different stages in my life, but expectations can also affect the way we experience things.

I was born in a big city, and when I was six years old, my parents decided to move to a completely different place by the coast, about 1000km from the city. They had been there two weeks before on a work trip for my dad and fell in love with the place. My brother and I had no idea of where this was and how it looked like. All we could do to get an idea was to listen to my parents talk about it.

From what my mum said, and out of what my imagination was able to produce, for me, it sounded like we were moving to Disneyland – even though I had never been in Disneyland before.

We drove there, it took two days. For a six-year-old, that was a long road trip. In addition, the closer we got to the place, the hotter the weather, so I remember the last hours of the trip as a little torture.

When we finally arrived, I remember so well my mum being super excited in the car, and me being super disappointed. The place was a small town, the vegetation completely different from what I grew up with, and what is worse, it didn’t look like what I had imagined at all! I think I kept my disappointment to myself, but I remember it took a while before I understood why we had left our big beautiful house in the city for this.

My experience in this new place was affected by the idea I had created in my mind. I eventually came over it  because as it turns out, it was a great place to grow up in, but I often remember this episode in my life and I have to laugh because as an adult, I have experienced quite often the same. I create an idea of how things should be and struggle with the disappointment of how things actually are.

There is nothing wrong with dreaming and having objectives, I can almost hear some of you thinking as you read, and I agree, but we might want to be aware of the moments when our experience of reality is muddled by our expectations.

I don’t know how many times I have spoiled an experience for me and those around me because if this. Either because of too high expectations or because of my biased mind.

I once had a boyfriend with whom I was very very in love but I was sure he was going to end up leaving me for someone ‘better’ than me. I had convinced myself that he was with me to pass the time, and as soon as he discovered that I wasn’t that great, he would leave me for someone greater than me. I must specify that at that time, I wasn’t aware of this, this became clear to me later.

So, most of the time I was with him, I was interpreting all his actions and inactions as a sign of him soon dumping me. If he was kind, he was kind out of pity, if he has distant, he was distant because he was tired of me, or even worse, he had a better time with another woman. It was exhausting, mainly for me because I didn’t necessarily share these crazy thoughts with him.

My point here is, how many times I messed up the nice time spent with him because of my inability to be in the moment without interpreting every action, every word, every gesture?  I was so lost in my perceptions that I couldn’t open up to the here and now.

I have been having fun with these memories this week because, I now know how my perception affects what I experience and how I experience it. This can be a useful tool both to show more understanding of other people’s attitudes and actions and also to be more aware of my own attitudes and actions towards the world around me. Especially when experiencing challenges. Maybe the challenge doesn’t really come from the outer world after all!

This has also led to a mind game I’ve been playing recently. Imagine if we could wake up every day to a completely new day! We would never ever need to travel away to find new things because the reality before our own eyes would constantly be offering us the opportunity to be amazed, to be surprised, to see something new and refreshing. All that is required from us is to open our eyes and let the mind rest.

Reflection on death, love and life right now

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A very dear friend died this week. He opened the doors of his home when I was a young adult (or an old child), he shared his culture with me, helped me learn the language, and opened my horizons to other ways of seeing the world.

I hadn’t seen him in the last five years since we no longer live in the same country, but we stayed in contact through social media. He would write a message from time to time with a picture from where he was, or what he was doing, and I would do the same.

He was what we could call a dry person, not effusive, but through the years I knew him, I learned to see his way of showing love and care.

From what I observed from the distance, I think that he struggled to see the love in those he loved the most. He had his temper and his very specific way of perceiving the world which at times came in the way between him and those close to him. I think that the last few years had been very difficult for him in this sense, and therefore, today, when I learned about his passing, I started refelcting on one phrase I heard on a podcast earlier this week “we see what we are looking for”.

I can recognize myself in this too. Sometimes, the void inside is so strong, that we can’t manage to see the love around us. I think is sometimes difficult to say where the void comes from, maybe past experiences, ways of percieving life, genetics? The orignie is maybe even irrelevant, what I think is important is to notice the void inside us. To have the courage to see it. Only then, we will be able to heal it, and feel the love. Maybe, if we recognize our inner void, we can acknowledge other people’s void, and then be able to show more empathy, more understanding regardless of their behavior.

I hope from the bottom of my heart that my friend died knowing how much we loved him.

I hope from the bottom of my heart, that we all find the force to clear our vision and see the love in everyone and evertything around us.