Here is a question I liked in The Daily Stoic Journal and my answer to it:
What would happen if I took a second to cool down?
I imagined this Saturday going a whole different way but a spontaneous family outing idea changed that.
You see, spontaneity is something that still doesn’t come naturally to me. I love to know how my days would look like, especially weekends.
Here in Jordan, we still have complete lock-downs on Fridays (the first day of the weekend) and the weather was too cold last weekend, so saying no to this outing would have meant skipping 2 weekends in a row.
Moreover, creating family memories with my 2 kids is very important to me in my big picture goals. Being lighthearted, easy-going and fun is something I’d also like them to remember about me, therefore I said yes and went along for the ride.
Past me would have stayed home because that was the plan. If I was physically tired I still would have stayed home. In the future I still want to plan weekends ahead of time. Luckily, today I had the energy to both remember my goals and act on them when the chance presented itself.
I am glad I did.
Do you remember the first self-help book you ever read? I do. It was the classic Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking, translated to Arabic. I read it one summer when I perhaps was 14-15 years old at my grandmother’s house where I used to spend summers with my sisters. My aunt Stella bought it or borrowed it from someone. I remember being mesmerized by the idea that we need to pay attention to the quality of our thoughts. I remember my excitement reading it and enjoying this shiny new type of non-fiction books I got my hands on.
I usually give credit to reading the more recent controversial book The Secret for turning on the lights for me how my thoughts were powerful and that I needed to watch them. This classic book I read as a young teenager, however, was actually the first to tell me there were two kinds of life outlooks. The positive and the negative.
I now wonder why I had to stumble into a book to learn this key life lesson. How can I teach this skill to my kids? I believe the way I behave and talk to them and to myself infront of them is crucial in teaching them this view. But is it enough?
Thinking about this book today I realize I need to be more vocal about how to view our life’s ups and downs and let my kids find out the good news from their mummy first.