I congratulate my children when tney hurt themselves. I tell them that if they aren’t skinning a knee or bumping their head or something from time to time, they are not doing their job as children. Once I’ve verified they are OK, I also laugh at them.
Today I went for a hike, and my oldest said that if I fell down the hill, as long as I was alright, they would laugh at me. I said that was fine.
A story I’ve told often to them is when I was a plumber’s assistant a long time ago, there was a beam in the attic where we kept some supplies that was large and low. It was too hard to duck under it, but it was at just that height where you forget about it. Someone had written “Watch Out”, and someone “seriously, you will hit your head on this.” I made a mental note for that not to be me. How could anyone be that stupid?
Well, when I did, it was one of those things where your head stops instantly, but your feet keep going, and you literally land on your ass. I literally saw the stars people talk about (not for the first time). They think this story is hilarious, because once I picked myself up, I myself thought it was funny.
Pain is a fact of life. That is a given. How we choose to deal with it, and how much risk we incur, are up to us. That is the domain of our freedom. You can live a very safe life with little injury, little anxiety, and from my point of view little growth.
This isn’t what I want for my children. I want them to fall on their asses from time to time, cry their eyes out, get back up, and go again without worrying about it.
When someone falls in front of you, sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do it watch them struggle, doing nothing, until they realize on their own they have the power to manage the situation. I literally did this with kids when they were younger. I would only help them once I was satisfied they had made a serious effort.
If you pick a man up, you teach him to remain on the ground unless he is helped. If you teach him to get up–which in large measure consists in forcing him to figure it out for himself–then you teach him to walk as a free man.
We see so many people rejecting freedom. I will make some of my commentary on that my next post.