Children

There’s a moment I am starting to recognise, when you say goodbye to your adult child, tell them again you love them and watch them walk off, putting in their earphones, striding back into their own lives. I know you won’t see them again for a couple of months and they probably won’t phone or message as often as I might wish. Mainly because they have their own support and resources and people into which to sink now. For sure, I am still useful and wanted and loved – only not so often. I am no longer their world and I cannot be there to sort things out, fix the problem, play their favourite film and hold them close on the sofa.

And that hurts. But equally it isn’t a stabbing loss. It’s a softer gentler wound and easier to step back from and take in a wider gentler view that Charlotte Joko Beck calls a “A bigger Container”. This is nothing much more than the simple idea of giving something perspective and seeing the bigger picture. But in a meditation setting it becomes that much more powerful. I can ask “What else is present?” Or at least “What else might be here?” And in this way it becomes more possible to hold more of what is present in our lives. We can allow awareness to bulge and our lives to be richer in each moment.

I heard a wonderful teacher say when your children leave home is when equanimity is a wonderful heart quality to nourish and fertilise. And after watching my eldest get out the car and walk off to work today as I drove back to my home town I knew exactly what she meant. Whilst I am sitting damp-eyed in my car and wondering just what the hell I do with my life now all three of them have left home, I can also remember my own twenties and see how my children are now standing open-armed in front of the freedom and broad spanning horizons I could sense at their age. The excitement and pulse of it all. The trial and error as well as the trial and success. The possibilities, all those possibilities.

It’s not there is one thing which we compare with another. There is no hierarchy of preference in this. There is this AND there is that. All things are here simultaneously; you don’t get one without the others. My grief for lost parenthood, its sense of inseparableness and purpose is concurrent, coexistent and colocated with the beauty of those once toddlers now making their own way and sharing their own love in the world.

Engrained habit means most of the time I hone in on one feeling or another, saying “This is me. I am grief.” Or “My life is now aloneness and nothing else.” But both in meditation and off the cushion because you have meditated it is possible to see passed, through and around that first and most obvious sensation. We can step back into A Bigger Container and feel the inescapably intertwined swirl of it all.

And of course after that we get lost in an idea of a separate self and our emotions. All we have to do then is to step back again and again and again. This is not a short journey. But is a beautiful one in which the end is already right here under our feet in this very moment.