Its a long trail…choose your pace.

You don’t get to “pick” the life you get. Okay, some  folk say you do in some ethereal zone somewhere, but we are talking about day-to-day physical life here. Your life.  Some people get born into a loving family with lots of resources and support and others start with a lot of suffering, negative experiences and no Barbie doll.  You get the life you get.

There is a lot you can do with the life you get as long as you are willing to take care of it.  For those who have a hard life it is important to know that, while you can’t change the hand of cards you got dealt, if you play them well you can have a fantastic life.

Important Steps to a Fantastic Life

One of the first steps to a good life, no matter the cards you got, is recognizing your first choice. You get to choose whether you walk your life with dignity and whether you walk it feeling ashamed or kicking and screaming each step of the way. Choose dignity.

Secondly you get to choose how you treat yourself.

If you got a hard life, its very important you make sure you don’t compare yourself to people with Barbie doll lives OR that you try to run your life at the same pace as those with many resources. Why? Because you can end up running your own precious life into the ground. “Trying to keep up” is something that can actually keep you from progressing. In the fable of the tortoise and the hare the tortoise uses the legs he got at the pace he got, and, step-by-step his strength of endurance won the race.

Indigenous wisdom always says WALK your life.White “knowledge” says,

“RUN! SPRINT! PUSH! SHOVE! ELBOW! or whatever you have to do to get to the top of the heap otherwise your life is NADA, worthless, worth NOTHING!” 

This is just Pahooie. It isn’t true.  Worse, this level of push just grinds those with hard lives into the ground. That level of frenzied activity can’t create good outcomes when life is difficult.

Why Shoving Won’t Work

Think about life like a long trail where everyone has a different handicap or weight they have to carry in their backpack.  The important thing is to be able to go the distance and to keep going every day.  Running and sprinting is easy if you only have trail mix and an energy drink in your superlite expensive backpack. If you are carrying 55kg in your backpack (a large struggling dog) or hauling a concrete block, then trying to run and sprint doesn’t help you. On the contrary, it  exhausts you and causes you to collapse.  Then you can’t even go the distance!  Never mind being able to keep up with Barbie and the trail mix kids!

Beware PUSH and MANIA messages if you have a hard life. These messages actually increase your handicap.  Walking with heavy burdens, psychologically or physically, means you need to walk well and carefully so you can go the distance.

Of course you want to keep reducing your burden while you walk. It is just important to know that part of reducing your burden is learning to walk at a pace you can sustain so you can build up your capacity.

Pacing Your Life to Walk Well

You don’t pace your life by putting yourself on steroids or uppers or protein powders to try to quickly increase your muscles.  You don’t get ahead by pitching your tent after a day of uphill slog and THEN forcing yourself to do 40 minutes of cross-training to keep up with the yuppie pack!

Understand that when life is hard you have already DONE your cross-training by carrying your pack and surviving your day!

Walk your day as best you can and then REST at night. That will be enough.

Remember that you carry children on your back. A frantic, manic pace of living scares them because they know that tomorrow you may not be able to get up and walk a new day.  They know that if you become exhausted you can’t carry them. They know this means they may be forced to carry burdens they are not yet able to bear. This can break something precious inside of them.

If you have a hard life now you may remember having this experience yourself as a child  and getting broken.   So…resist the manic PUSH of a culture that is testosterone based and testosterone driven. That level of Push only works to get Ug the caveman running fearlessly after the Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is not a plan that works for mothers with small children.

The origin of testosterone fuelled mania.

YOU cannot afford to live the anabolic steroid lifestyle when you are nurturing children.

For one thing you risk giving them a phobia or a disorder (subject of another blog another time) but at the very least your life will become chaotic, disordered, manic and stress filled.  The home was always meant to be run at the pace of the heartbeat. Calm, gentle, rhythmic, solid and dependable. Always there – able to make it to the end of the race.

Power: Home as a Safe, Nurturing Space

Hestia Goddess of the home was represented by the cooking fire and the hearth.  The symbol of the ever-burning hearth was to explain to us that healthy human development requires stable rhythm, ongoing nourishment and someone ensuring there is always enough fuel to keep the fire burning.

The predictability of a well paced life creates safety and a place of refuge your child feels he or she can always predict and trust.

The hearth of Hestia is always kept burning with a steady flame of nourishment and warmth.   The hearth keeps the flame alive but not at full burn. Only enough fuel for what is needed.

Women with small children who run at blaze all day every day consume not only their resources but the growth resources of the child which are ALL slow burn timber. They have no resources for the future.   Your energy (the fuel for the fire) must be paced for a low simmer, a gentle smoke.  It should only be raised to blazing when there is a short period of intense need. Everyday mania and rush will never work.

Keep the flame on low burn.

With a paced life  the days and weeks before an intense period have been walked calmly to ensure there is enough energy for the short and unusual times a blaze is actually needed.  Don’t listen to a culture that tells you that every day is a rush.

Your journey as a mother, or even a human being, is long and must be walked well each day.  The calm everyday continuous rhythm of a well paced life is the rhythm that turns a hard life into a good life.  There is enough energy for tomorrow, next week, next month and next year.

Your children will instinctively draw closer to a hearth and run from the flame thrower. They know instinctively that mania harms their development. Be a hearth – not a flame thrower.

Walk your life. Pace your life for your own well being and that of your children- and you will be able to walk well.

Resist the modern push to mania!

There is no Tyrannosaurus Rex at the heart of the home.