Mississippi Bluffs on a Saturday Afternoon

Yesterday the kids and I hiked around near the Mississippi River, both on the Minneapolis side and the St. Paul side.  On the St. Paul side, near where Summit Avenue meets Mississippi River Blvd., my son was hoping to climb down on the limestone bluffs overlooking the river, a usual highlight of our river visits.  But it was too icy and muddy, and my daughter kept slipping in her pink kitty rainboots and fell down and scraped her knee.  Climbing down on the bluffs with them by myself was just not a safe option yesterday.  

My son was so disappointed.  He snarled, "Well, we'd better stay on the bluffs for 14 HOURS the next time we come here, or YOU'RE not going to live to see another sunset!"

"You're threatening me with death?" I asked.  This was a new level of confrontation for us, never before reached in his six-and-a-half years on Earth.

We sat back to back on a stone bench for a while, silent, while my daughter played a game of her own invention that involved running around trees and chanting an unintelligible song.  

Finally, I said, "It sounds like you're feeling really frustrated and helpless and disappointed.  It's hard when you have an idea in mind about what you want to have happen, and it doesn't turn out, or when you want something and you can't have it.  I think it's probably the hardest feeling humans have.  I know I still struggle with it a lot when that happens to me.  I think that's why I became a Buddhist."

"Really?" my son turned toward me on the bench.

We talked a little about what the Buddha said--that suffering arises when we cling to wanting things to be a certain way.  I mentioned that even some very experienced Zen students and priests I knew struggled when things didn't go their way, and he seemed surprised by that.

I felt a new peace in him, a temporary sense of release.  And later, my husband and I joked with him about his threat.  

"You know," my husband pointed out, "I think it would have been much more ominous if he'd said you wouldn't live to see another sunrise.  Because then you'd be nervous about whether you should go to sleep, or what might happen while you're asleep."