We all need support – Touch The Future

Somebody who when you’re in trouble you can call and say come and they wouldn’t say well do this and I’ll see you in the morning. They would just show up. And I think children need that too. They need to know who they can go to. That you’re going to be there. That you’ll get up no matter how tired you are. I hope that my children always know that. We also need people who are confidents. People that we can say something to and we know they would never repeat it.

Things to think about

How many people in your life give you any kind of support? Is it one person, a handful, or several depending on your needs?
Do you let kids confide in you?
What kind of support person are you in others life?
What kind of support person are you to children?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

Jerry Mander, author of The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, with the deepest insights about TV and media in general, noted way back in 1970’s that media has a very difficult time representing the sacred or love. When pressed through the technology-sieve, the sacred ends up looking hokey. But media has an easy time representing fear and violence; that it not only does well but with compound interest. In this way commercial media-advertising-technology is essentially Machiavellian, using clever lies and tricks in order to get or achieve something—clever and dishonest by design. Those who control media-technology know this, which was the overarching theme of Jerry’s book. And these toxic, for-profit, commercial image-making photons are shot directly into the brains of billions of unsuspecting human beings, who predictably react as Pavlovian dogs when the bell rings. Because of this, media-based technology is the handmaiden of the lowest flight-fight brain. Fox-Not-News is one of the most blatant examples. Where that is “the other,” love and compassion are not. It is that simple.

A brain completely enchanted by fear is incapable of perceiving anything else. Even when projecting safety, it is in response to fear and therefore is fear in disguise. Our only hope, and this is a big stretch, is to allow our young and precious developing hearts and minds to experience safety, play, and therefore love deeply enough, long enough, so that when fear does pop out of the box, it is seen for what it is, a hoax, and is transformed by the light of insight. Developing this sensitivity, awareness and transformative insight is the challenge and responsibility we call parenting. But first things first. We must be the change we hope for our children. We must see the hoax and transform our fear into love, and become what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls the “model imperative.” Nothing less will meet the challenge. With this imperative in mind, it is important to distinguish between a “real” experience and a concept or idea. Unless our ideas, study and insights are translated into “actual behavior,” they remain thin and superficial, almost nonexistent. And this includes the thousands of hours we spend relating to computers, tablets, phones, in school, and on the Internet. It is not the thought that counts. It is how we treat each other; love or fear.

I think all of our lives we need tremendous support. Now one of the things that I think you can’t just go out and ask people for their support. I mean it’s something that grows over time and I think that there’s a particular kind of people that you need in your lives and one of the people that we need as a part of our support group would be somebody who can hold you through the night. Somebody who when you’re in trouble you can call and say come and they wouldn’t say well do this and I’ll see you in the morning. They would just show up. And I think children need that too. They need to know who they can go to. That you’re going to be there. That you’ll get up no matter how tired you are. I hope that my children always know that. We also need people who are confidents. People that we can say something to and we know they would never repeat it. And I think if you have one person who is like that I think it’s almost a miracle because all of us have said something to somebody and then they’ve said it to somebody else when we really, really thought it would be a very private thing. So we need people we can confide in and I think kids do too. They need to be able to trust you and that you will do that. I think one of the things we need is we need intellectual structures, people who stretch us, who say things we don’t understand, that we have to think about, that they have to kind of write down and think about it again. I kind of think it’s an issue because that doesn’t seem to me sometimes what early childhood people want. They want to hear the same thing and that you’re doing a fine job. Even parents sometimes, they want oh everything I do is okay. We need people who stretch us all the time. Joseph Chilton Pearce is that king of a person for people if they pay attention to him. People who stretch you. People who pay attention. I think we also need people who pay attention to environmental issues and dwell deeper into things like organic food, the way we need to take care of the land, things that we can do. You know I have a son who is so passionate about that and I think sometimes when you listen to him and you pay attention to him he seems kind of nutty. I mean he’s so, so almost over-wrought about all of the things that we do, but boy he’s an important person. He keeps you on track. You know what to buy. I know that anything he brings me is organic. So that kind of a person, kind of a health nut, a person who knows the latest things that we’re doing, things that we should be doing, and I love that. Sometimes we are these people for other people. I think everybody in their life needs a fun and adventure person. Sometimes we do that for other people. We’re the people who say oh come on, let’s go do this, let’s do that. And sometimes you get weary of it but we have to understand sometimes our role in the lives of other people, we have to be the kind of people who say come on, let’s do this and let’s do that. But I think that we always need to pay attention to those people. There are people who know how to have fun, people who are aware of adventures that are out there. You now my friend Jenny who lives in Canada is that kind of a person. She’s always, I always think oh my goodness. She’ll grab you, I just flew in to Vancouver one night and she said, “Oh come on.” And I was tired. I’d worked all day and I flew up there and I was going to do workshop the next day, she said, “I’ve got a movie to take you to” and I thought oh my God, that’s the last thing in the world I want to do. But she has a sense, it was a really important movie and I remember loving it, but I think that fun and adventure, sometimes you can get stuck in a rut and you don’t do those things very well. I also think that for parents, maybe I’m this kind of a person, and for me, other people are, I think we need to have people in our lives who have been there before. Sometimes it’s almost like we don’t even know those people, but sometimes it’s very real. I think one of the things that is very alright, I think very helpful and very deep for my parents is they know I’ve done all of this over and over and over again, and I’ve seen things and I’ve done things that they haven’t. I don’t use that as a wedge to do it my way but I think they have a sense, oh she’s been there before.