Dad Attitude: Our Inner Worlds
Have you ever heard a keynote speaker say something like, “Have you ever gone from work to home, and when you arrive at home, you don’t know how you got there?”
Those speakers are conveying that the consequence of our heightened level of absent-mindedness—our lack of focus and presence—is to simply go through the motions of life. Things like commuting to and from work become rote. Replace the word commute with anything else (work, cooking, cleaning, kids’ lives, home duties, relationship) and suddenly we’re going from Point A to Point B with no real recollection or differentiation of how we’re doing it. Those series of similar days become weeks, then a month, and then a whole season, and what do we have to remark it with? What was the whole point?
The notion that our daily lives should amount to a sum total is perhaps the problem. I’m guilty of this all the time. What did I get for doing what I did? If we live with this incentive structure, we step onto the mouse-wheel and spin away. We forget why we do anything in the first place.
So what’s the antidote? It’s not equating our self-worth to how long we can stay on the treadmill. And it’s definitely not being present—which is a tired aphorism as it is.
The Beatles had it right: all you need is love. As long as we bless everything we do with love, then all will be well. It’s just that simple. Put love first, and the rest makes sense. I remind myself of this constantly, yet why is this emotion (sometimes) so fickle?
Love, like it’s opposite anger, feeds on itself. If it receives more of the energy it generates, the emotion grows stronger. More love = more love. To feed love, we often think we need it from other people. While the reciprocation of love indeed creates more love (for ourselves), the feeling we want most only comes from within. Love of our self is the spark to the fire. Another musical genius, Bob Marley, sings about the love light. Just keep the love light burning, he sings.
The love light is within us all. We don’t need anyone else to ignite it for us. Only we can find and maintain love of self. How do we get it? Check in with yourself often. Ask yourself if you’re feeling loved by yourself. Ask yourself what you need. If you’re feeling any of the bad stuff—anger, fear, resentment, or guilt—you’ll probably tell yourself you need love. It’s all you need.
◊♦◊
Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash