Tag: Kids

Most of us were taught young that some feelings are unacceptable. Anger, resentment, fear, sorrow. Not argued out of them, simply given to understand that they should not be shown. What follows is predictable. A feeling that cannot be stated does not evaporate. It looks for another exit.

The shapes it takes

Someone who feels guilty saying no agrees to things, then breaks the promise later. They could not refuse when refusing was the honest answer, so the refusal arrives as unreliability instead.

Someone else substitutes a compliment with an edge on it for the insult they will not say. The words are warm and the meaning is cold, and the distance it creates is the point.

Underneath both is usually a person in more difficulty than the behaviour suggests. More often than not it is a request for help made by somebody who has no other way to make it.

Where the power actually sits

Here is the part worth holding on to. Passive aggression is most often used by people who feel powerless, not powerful. Faced with feelings they have been taught to treat as unacceptable, they avoid the confrontation entirely, and the avoidance itself feels like control. Because nothing overt is ever shown, they frequently cannot understand why the people around them have drifted away.

Which tells you what not to do. Do not be drawn into a contest of power with somebody who is behaving this way because they feel they have none. You will be fighting the symptom.

Three responses that work

When a person close to you is visibly frustrated and insists nothing is wrong, say what you are actually seeing. The tone, the shortness, the gesture. Then invite them to tell you. Naming the mismatch without accusation gives them a way to speak that does not require them to admit they were sulking.

When a compliment arrives with a blade in it, explain calmly how it landed and why. Not as a complaint. As information they may not have.

When somebody breaks promise after promise, tell them plainly that they are allowed to say no to you. That is often the whole cure.

And then the uncomfortable part

Once you can see this clearly in other people, you will start to catch it in yourself. The remedy is smaller than it sounds. Say the true thing while it is still small.

The feelings we are taught to suppress are usually the ones pointing at something that needs to change. Passive aggression is the method by which we avoid changing anything at all.

We see what we would like to see, which is why the plainest facts about our own lives are the ones we notice last. That a person we love has offended us. That a friendship we counted as close is not held that way on the other side.

Life is not all sunshine. It is also an ordinary Thursday at ten at night, an empty wallet, and the discovery that some people are warm to you when you are struggling and cool when you begin to do well. Here is the short list.

On ourselves

We are excellent judges of other people’s lives and very good defence lawyers for our own. The same act gets a verdict when somebody else does it and a justification when we do.

The rat race has a problem nobody mentions at the start. If you win it, you are still a rat.

Conversations go far better in our heads than they do in rooms. The version you rehearse has a cooperative other person in it.

The sentence “I do not need to write that down, I will remember it” is false almost every time it is spoken.

We overestimate what we can get done in one day and badly underestimate what we could do in twenty years. Both errors come from the same place, which is that a day is easy to picture and a decade is not.

On other people

Most people want to see you doing well. Rather fewer want to see you doing better than them, and the second group overlaps with the first more than is comfortable.

One person’s loss really is another person’s gain, and both of them are usually decent people.

The people who can make you happiest are the same people who can make you saddest. That is not a warning about them. It is the definition of having let somebody close.

People take the path that returns the most for the least effort. This is not a character flaw, it is how effort works, and it explains more behaviour than malice ever will.

And the one that stings: the more you depend on other people to have a good time, the lonelier you tend to be when nobody is available.

What to do with a list like this

Nothing dramatic. Notice which one you reacted to. The item that irritated you on the way past is usually the one that applies.

Neighbours are worth having. Most of the time the arrangement is quietly useful, and a street where people know each other is a better street to live on. Then there is the other kind. The one you can neither avoid nor particularly want near you, who knows what time you came home and asks you why.

First, decide which problem you have

There are two of them and they need different answers. One is a neighbour who is actually doing you harm, interfering in something that matters, repeating things that damage you. The other is a neighbour who is merely irritating. People often spend the energy for the first on the second, and then wonder why the irritation grew.

If it is the smaller one, a plain word usually does more than a strategy. Say, politely and directly, that what they are doing makes you uncomfortable. Many people have genuinely not noticed. Say it once, without a speech attached.

Then be straight about the boundary

If the polite version does not land, the clear version is not rude. Tell them you would rather they did not involve themselves in your personal matters. A boundary stated plainly is easier for everyone than one enforced by atmosphere.

The counter-intuitive move

Invite them in for a coffee. It sounds like the opposite of what you want, and it works more often than it should, because it is much harder to talk about somebody you have started to like. A stranger next door is material. A person you have sat with is not.

Where the person cannot be spoken to at all, someone else in that house usually can. Say how it is affecting you and ask for help stopping it.

Why the supply matters more than the speech

Here is the mechanism under all of it. Talk needs new material. A story that gets no fresh detail runs out on its own, and the habit moves to whoever is still feeding it. That is why the quiet responses so often beat the confrontational ones.

Two of them are commonly recommended and both carry a cost. You can answer a question about your private life with a question about theirs, chosen to be equally uncomfortable. You can also ignore the person deliberately and let them see that you are doing it. Both work. Both also mean you are now playing the same game, and the street is small.

The cheaper version is simply to stop being interesting. Answer briefly, say nothing new, and let the subject starve.

Celestial objects, the phenomena surrounding them and the question of where they came from: those together make up the subject called astronomy.

Few sciences are older. People have been practising it since prehistoric times.

What it rests on now

The modern version of the subject leans very heavily on established physics, the laws of motion set out by Newton and the general theory of relativity among them.

That dependence is recent. For most of its history astronomy was open to anybody, and reputations were built by seers and sages who put the stars to practical use.

The uses were practical indeed. Working out where you stood in the year. Steering a ship. Sailors crossing the Atlantic in the age of Columbus navigated by the same lights.

Where it goes next

Whatever comes next in astronomy will come from new ways of observing.

Interferometry is the one to watch, sometimes described as the hypertelescope, in which a network of telescopes is made to work cooperatively so that images resolve.

Pushed far enough, that technique could let us look straight at planets orbiting other stars, instead of inferring their presence from the gravitational signature they leave behind. The difference is between deducing a planet and seeing one.

Pretty pictures and silly animal stories is what people assume children’s books amount to. A good many of them are timeless instead, and they are inspiring, insightful and wise.

Sharing, the force of love, the business of becoming what you could be: none of these lessons were ever really aimed at children alone. They were aimed at the child that survives in everybody. Take the cue and see where the messages land in your own life.

We must take care of the planet

Nothing improves until somebody cares an enormous amount. Absolutely nothing.

Nearly all of us met that message early, in books and in cartoons about rescuing the world. It was among the first lessons we were given, and among the first we put down.

Love is powerful

How a thing was manufactured has no bearing on whether it is real. Realness is something done to you, by somebody who loves you over a long stretch of years.

Every story in which a toy or an animal longed to talk and dance the way people do rested on that. Somewhere a character loved without limit, and the unreal wanted to cross over because of it. That was the message underneath all of them.

Happiness has no value unless it is shared

Give away more, and what comes back is more delight, not less.

Certain books left something lovely here, which is that friendship and happiness both consist of handing your joy to other people rather than hoarding it.

Face challenges head on

Over is not an option. Under is not an option. The way out is forward, through the middle.

Hard times have unpleasant sections and no path goes round them. You plough into them instead. Book after book puts its characters in serious trouble, has them face it with courage, and has them make peace for themselves and for their friends.

Learning is a lifelong journey

Why travel from one place to another? Chiefly to see everything lying between the two.

Arriving is not the valuable part, and neither is the satisfaction that follows a milestone. The value is in the travelling, and in whatever gets learned along the way. That learning is meant to continue for as long as the journey does, which is to say for life.

Make things up as you go

No moon to see by? Then draw one. Hungry? Draw a pie. Lost? Draw somebody who can point you the right way.

Grown up, we tend to forget the point being made. The best chances life offers are usually the ones a person invents.

Few animals display social intelligence at the level elephants do, and alongside it they show individual reasoning and a long memory.

So where does their health and their contentment come from? Speech is not available to them, but a great deal about a well-rounded life gets communicated all the same. What follows are wellness pointers, tusk to tail, from the largest mammal walking the earth.

Be a social creature

Whatever their age, elephants lean on close friendships inside the herd.

Shyness is the thing to drop. When your own reserves are low, go and find other people.

Listen up

Ears that size were not issued for decoration. Take the counsel and the accumulated sense of the friends and teachers you love.

Set off alone and the cost is everything you might have heard from somebody who has already covered that ground.

Eat lots of plants

Three hundred pounds of food a day and upwards is the elephant diet, made up of roots, of leaves, of twigs and of fruit.

The quantity is worth scaling down. The principle is not. Greens in volume do humans as much good as they do pachyderms.

Drink plenty of water

Heat makes hydration urgent, which is why something near eleven gallons of water goes into a grown elephant across a day.

There is a second use for the watering hole. A trunk dipped in now and again is simply a way of staying cool and refreshed.

Take the rest you need

Rather than work through the heat, elephants nap in the middle of the day beneath trees and in the shade of rocks. Their nights are slept properly too.

Which settles an argument. However grown up a creature is, recharging time is still part of the requirement.

Take your time to grow

A young elephant stays bound to its immediate family for up to three years.

Healthy development, in other words, is not something that can be hurried or forced. Grow into your tusks at the speed they grow.

At her dining table one evening, a young woman sat worrying. Taxes were owed. The house needed work. And the following day the whole family would be arriving.

Gratitude was not what she was feeling.

The homework

Glancing to one side, she saw her small daughter bent over a notebook, writing furiously.

The class had been set an unusual paragraph to write, the girl explained, on the subject of negative thanksgiving. They were to list things they were grateful for, but only the ones that feel unpleasant at first and turn out well in the end.

Curious now, the mother leaned across and read what her daughter had put down.

Grateful for final examinations, on the grounds that they mean school is nearly finished. Grateful for medicine that tastes horrible, on the grounds that it works. Grateful for being woken by an alarm clock, on the grounds that being woken means being alive.

The same list, read again

And the mother realised that her own evening would take the same treatment.

So she went back through it.

Taxes were owed, which meant there was employment to owe them from. The house needed work, which meant the house was hers. A family had to be fed, which meant there was a family to sit down with.

The habit underneath

Complaining about the bad things comes naturally to most of us. Turning them over to see what is printed on the other side does not.

Which makes one question worth putting to your own day. Inside your negatives, where is the positive?

Find the better half of today, and let today be a good one.

Some of the strangest and most interesting facts about animals around the world are collected here.

Goats pick up an accent

A goat’s voice bends with its surroundings and with the company it keeps, which is exactly what happens to ours.

Penguins propose

A male penguin offers a pebble to the female. That is the proposal, and affection is what the stone stands for.

Elephants laugh and cry

Both, and they do something else besides. A family member returning after an absence is met with a ceremony of welcome.

Cows have best friends

Sociable animals, cows, and a cow will often single out one companion above the rest. Separate the pair and stress follows.

Whale songs travel like pop music

Where a stretch of water is shared by several whales, one song is sung by all of them, and the song keeps developing.

A tune with enough hook in it then moves. Other regions pick it up, other groups learn it and join in, and the spread looks remarkably like what a human hit record does.

Lionesses stay together for life

Their whole lives, in the same company. Cubs change nothing for the females, who remain with their mothers and their aunts, while the young males leave to find prides of their own.

Seahorses hold hands

One partner for life is the seahorse rule. Fertilised eggs are carried by the male, in a pouch, until the young are ready to be born.

They have one more habit. Swimming side by side, two seahorses will link tails, which is about as close to holding hands as a fish gets.

Being the favourite grandchild carries one pleasant duty, which is sitting down and working out what to give her.

There is nothing conditional about her kindness, and that makes her easy to love. Your arrival, and the arrival of the whole noisy lot of you, delights her. A woman like that has earned her smile, which is why choosing something for her feels less like an errand and more like a pleasure.

An appetizer set

Nothing pleases her more than the family filling her house. Nothing else in the cupboard means quite as much to her as that expensive china.

And there lies the difficulty. Every time the china comes out she is faintly tense, because somewhere in the room a young one might knock a piece off a table.

A good ceramic appetizer set solves it. She can fill the house, feed everybody, and put the anxiety down for the evening.

A handmade pillow

Personal means hours, not money. She notices effort, she is mindful by temperament, and gratitude comes easily to her.

Sew her a small pillow and embroider something onto the front of it that means something in her life. A building she loves. A map of a place that matters to her. If gardening or the outdoors is her pleasure, then a tree or a flower.

A coupon book

She is fond of a great many things, and the ones she is fondest of carry no price at all. They cannot be bought.

Which is the argument for coupons you have made yourself. Print them or write them out, then laminate them so they survive.

The fact that your hands made them is most of the gift. A few to begin with: one hug, a twenty minute walk together, a visit that happens immediately, an hour over afternoon tea.

Being yourself has a plain enough definition. What you say is what is true for you. The ideas and the thoughts you order your days around are your own. Something then becomes visible in you from the inside out, and other people read it as certainty.

Why pretending costs so much

Anyone in the world who is not doing this is hunting for that same assurance about who they are.

The reason is not mysterious. Stop being you, and the thing you have started attempting is to be something you are not.

Sustaining that has a price, and the price is charged internally. Stress arrives. So does confusion. So does a competitiveness that has nowhere to go, because the person being forced into existence is not you.

Where the habit was learned

Look at the crowd of people around you who have no idea who they are, and the origin of the habit becomes visible.

Nobody sat us down and taught it. As children we absorbed it: that in this society attention has to be competed for, and so does affection, and so does respect. Above all we absorbed two instructions: that a person must become somebody, and that a person must fit in.

Every one of those lessons carries a person away from what they already were.

The part of you that does not change

How you appear from outside will shift across the years. That is ordinary, and no cause for concern.

What sits underneath does not shift. There is a child in there still, unspoiled, fresh, playful, wide awake. At that depth, a person is not a version of life. They are life.

People who have stopped performing are simply what is true about them at that moment. They talk out of that inner place, and nothing about them needs managing.

It gives other people permission

Here is the effect that is easy to miss. Dropping the performance does something to the people around you, because it frees them to drop theirs.

Allowing another person to be who they are, and treating that as their right, is precisely what opens the same room for you. The two movements are one movement.

And anyone who recognises the genuine article in you will respect you for it, for the simple reason that it is what they are looking for themselves.