“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers not thunder.” ~Rumi
I’ve been reading Rumi lately. I can’t sit down and just read chapters of Rumi. I have to work through sentences, sometimes just words. His writings are dripping with wisdom. Sometimes I wish just holding the book of his teachings, his wisdom would seep through the cover and into the palms of my hands. It is so good. So, so, so good.
I need to confess here that I am a screamer. I work really hard to speak gently and with kindness, but then my kids come home from school and start fighting, and I lose it. I lose all the good thoughts and deep breathing and I lose the ability not to yell and not to curse. I am weak, very, very weak.
The World feels really loud lately. It feels very angry and hard and instead of becoming that too, I’m working to raise my words and not my voice. Raising words is harder than raising my voice. Raising words means sometimes crying while speaking. It means love instead of hate and grace instead of vindication. It’s really, really hard. I’m working on it.
The hard part about parenting (obviously, just one hard part, because most of it is hard) is that you are still growing as a human being, all while raising other human beings. Anyone that tells me they know how to parent with great confidence, either doesn’t have children, or has very young children. 16 and 1/2 years into parenting and I know a lot less than I did on day one. Because reading books about parenting and making a plan to raise hypothetical, reasonable children, is completely different than dealing with the irrational children in my house right now.
I always loved that Google’s mission statement is “Don’t be evil”, which is simple and brilliant. I made my mission in parenting to just raise good human beings. I was trying to keep from being completely overwhelmed with parenting. I knew I wouldn’t be perfect, but I felt I could commit to raising good humans.
Except, it turns out that in order to raise good humans you need to also be a good human, and I’m mostly good, but also a little bad. Thankfully, my Grandfather had a really wise saying that has helped me. “What you feed your mind you become”.
So, I’m feeding myself Rumi, and Bob Goff and Elizabeth Gilbert. And, if Rumi’s words don’t magically seep through the cover and into my soul, maybe, reading enough good will make me a better human being and in turn make my kids good humans too.