Wonder, an Antidote to Despair

A beautiful solution exists to one of parenting's greatest challenges.

Podcasts are a great way to get my creative brain juices flowing. So are walks; the repetitive motion gets me into a flow state. Obviously, the combination of podcasts + walks is especially good. I inevitably return home thrilled by someone else's brilliant insights into the world.

This week, while walking on a gorgeous sunny morning (because that’s what I do during my weird new unemployed life), I listened to Krista Tippett, host of On Being, talk to Sylvia Boorstein, a Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. The episode was on nurturing children and how good parents weave that practice into their everyday lives.

The whole episode was engaging, but one part stood out for me because it hit on a fundamental challenge of parenting—how to prepare your sweet, innocent, vulnerable child for the Big, Scary Outside World.

Tippett said that most parents struggle with knowing how much to expose a child to, and how to teach them to be kind and open while also being safe–and even tough when they need to be. Suffering and hardship must be acknowledged in order to stay informed and to respond with compassion, but those are not easy lessons. There's something almost devastating about revealing the world's uglier parts to a child, shattering their preconceived notions of peace and safety.

Boorstein offered advice that I never want to forget: Counter it with amazement.

If there's anything that can balance out the incomprehensible and unbearable pain of the world, it's a sense of wonder. She said to pay attention to the amazingness of people. "How kind they are. How resilient they are. How people will take care of people that they don't even know." The antidote to despair is to look at humans and nature and say, "They are amazing. Life is amazing. The sun came up in the exact right place this morning."

As parents, we must heap amazement and wonder onto our children, help them to cultivate a gaze that delights in the simplest things. This skill can prevent them from feeling lost in darkness, and it's a gift that they will carry forward through the rest of their lives.

Indeed, this lovely advice applies to everyone, parents or not. We adults can use it to banish the negativity and overwhelm that piles up in our own lives.

Get Outside to Find It

I think that amazement can be found most easily outdoors. When my children were little, walks took forever because they stopped to examine every leaf and twig along the way. At times I grew frustrated and had to remind myself that, for a child, "it's like everything has been invented for them," to quote Tippett. They give it a name. They feel it and taste it and stare at it. Sometimes now I wish I could recapture that wonder and feed it back to them as they grow in size, maturity, and inevitable cynicism.

That's why I still point out natural phenomena obsessively whenever we're outdoors—waxing moons and waning moons, tiny toads, the first daffodils, the largest icicle, skeletal tree branches against a winter sunset, paw prints in the snow, a newborn leaf on my houseplant—and I like to think it's working (even if they do roll their eyes sometimes).

Early this morning, my 11-year-old came in from doing chores and said, "Spring is coming! I can tell from the smell of the air and the merlins calling and the phew phew phew sound of some bird I don't know that always makes that sound at this time of year." He was beaming with excitement, and I knew that whatever challenges awaited him that day at school would be slightly easier to bear because of his delight in the world.

The takeaway for me, listening to that conversation, is that kids' exposure to the dark side of the world is inevitable. We can control it to a certain extent as parents, but there comes a point when we cannot shield them any longer. When that happens, the best thing we can do is remind our children constantly (and ourselves!) that goodness and beauty exist all around, no matter what else might be going on. It offers a soothing recalibration of sorts.

As long as we can retain that capacity for amazement, we will be well.