When my son reached Step 8 in the instructions, he couldn't find the two parts he needed in the pile of Legos, and he lost it. "They're gone forever!" he moaned, tears running down his face. He crawled under the table again. "I'm NEVER going to be dumb enough to try to put together Legos on the train. NEVER!"
I stayed in my seat this time. I just didn't have it in me to get under there again. We had an eight-hour ride ahead of us. I needed to pace myself. My daughter continued to happily shape her green fairy-sized food.
Then my son resurfaced. His face was still red and blotchy with tears. He looked again at the pile of Legos. He looked at the plane he was trying to assemble.
"Oh," he muttered. "The parts are already on the plane. I already did Step 8. That's kind of annoying." And then he calmly set to work with Step 9. Problem solved. I refrained from sermonizing about how there hadn't been any need to get upset in the first place, blah blah blah.
It wasn't until afterward that I realized what a wonderfully unusual moment this was for me. If I'd reacted the way I often do to his getting upset, I would have been frantic with anxiety, my head fluttering with thoughts about how I wished what was happening wasn't happening. I would have been worrying about what the other people in the lounge car were thinking about me and my weeping son. I would have been wishing that my son wasn't so upset, that he could shrug off disappointment more easily. I would have been casting around for ideas about how to distract him. And I would have been berating myself for bringing a toy with 52 tiny parts on the train in the first place.
But I wasn't thinking any of those things. I was thinking, "Well, this sucks that he might have lost the pieces he needed. I wonder how he'll handle it. I'll wait and see if he seems to need help before I jump in and try to fix things for him." I didn't try to wish the moment away. I believed my son could handle what was happening.
Years ago, before I had kids, when I used to attend Zen meditation retreats, I remember feeling absolutely miserable during one retreat. My leg kept falling asleep, I was hot, I couldn't settle down and stay with my breath, and I was sick of staring at a white wall for hours on end. I wanted to be able to get up and move around. I wanted to drink a beer. I wanted to watch a big dumb Hollywood movie with flashy special effects.
And then it struck me that it wasn't that there was anything all that horrible about what was happening to me at that moment. It wasn't that bad, just sitting still and resting on my meditation cushion. Compared to many human experiences, it was actually sort of pleasant, really. What made it horrible was how much I wanted what was happening to be different. What was horrible was fighting reality.
I'm finally, every once in a while, starting to be able to put this flash of realization into practice with my kids.
We had a good trip home on the Empire Builder, all in all. My son did get sick from too much travel food and threw up in an old bread bag, but he was a trooper through it all, taking it easy, letting his dad care for him. My daughter and I hung out in the snack car, and I overheard a conversation at the next table between a long-haired, bearded old man and another, middle-aged man wearing a black yarmulke. They were talking about a time an intruder broke into the younger man's house. He held a gun aimed at the intruder and was prepared to shoot when the cops arrived, saving him from having to make that decision.
"It wasn't your time to end that guy's life," the bearded man said with a smile. "The cops were your guardian angels."
"And his," the man who'd held the gun smiled back.
I rode through the dark with my daughter beside me, smiling too, glad, at least for the moment, to be part of the mystery of it all.
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