Reminder
Off to school, off to work
You cannot gain or lose any love today, I remind my daughter as she leaves for school. You are loved, wholly and completely, and that is an unchangeable fact. I tell her that it’s her work to remember this, to pave a highway in her brain that knows it.
Yes, she has to go to school, take tests, pack a lunch. I have to make podcasts, pay taxes, do laundry. There will always be tasks. But the work is to remember that we are loved. It is the only way to make it in this world.
It is the only way to survive our own attunements to others, all the ways we are programmed to pick up every slight, catalog every resentment, sniff out every whiff of dismissal or bemusement or annoyance. It is so easy to pave highways of not-enough, not-accepted, not-treasured.
There will be a million invitations today for her to change, a million invitations to perform, to hide, to adjust, all for the temporary approval of her peers.
But approval is not love, I remind my daughter and myself. And if we know the difference, really know it in our bones, we can stop issuing those invitations to others. We can walk around as the fact of love. That’s the work.
There are jobs, and we’re both off to do them. But the work is remembering that we are loved, wholly and completely, and that is an unchangeable fact.
"approval is not love" I will be sitting with that for awhile. I think if I am honest there are times when I would trade the complexity of being loved by imperfect people for approval. At least that is often what my actions reveal. This is a good reminder that it is a hollow replacement.
“You cannot gain or lose any love today…I tell her that it’s her work to remember this, to pave a highway in her brain that knows it.” I love that image of paving a highway. Because for so many of us, we have highways already paved from years of conditioning, telling us that what we do all day everyday is gain and lose love. But it isn’t an on/off switch. It might take years to repave that high, and that is ok.