Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could join us again. This week I've had rather a simple thought, really, and that is all about just trusting love.
Now, the reason this thought keeps coming up for me in this sort of recent weeks and months is that with our kids, when we trust love and trust our love for them and their love for us, it means a number of things that are so fundamental in establishing deep and enduring connections with our kids. One of them is, for example, when we trust love, we need to use fewer words. We need to explain less.
When we trust love, we can be more present and not have to fill the space with busyness, with suggestions, with answers to questions that have never really been asked. We can simply be more present in the presence of our kids. When we trust love, it takes us into much more of a listening space where we don't need necessarily to fix things.
We can listen to things and listen to our kids. And related to this pretty directly is that when we trust love, we can trust in our children's capacity to struggle and to problem-solve for themselves. If we simply trust in our love, then we create memories and it's interesting how it can have more of an impact in our children's life.
I'll give you a quick example. As a little boy, I think I must have been about eight, seven or eight years old, I was out in our woodshop at home and I was soaring away on a piece of wood with a lot of vigor and I was pushing and I really wasn't making much progress really. And my dad came through the shop and stood just quietly watching what I was doing.
And it was nice having him there. And what he did is that he picked up a brick which was used for propping open the door and he just dropped it from one hand to the other. He just let go of it and then caught it in his hand which was below.
Then he asked me for the saw and I gave it to him and he held it above and he dropped it, teeth down by the way, into his hand below and he caught it. He didn't cut himself, he just was quite a kind of coordinated chap and he caught it. And then he just looked at me and said, hmm, and then gave me back the saw and went on his way.
And I wondered what he meant, you know. So I put the saw back in the wood and then I thought, oh. And I started cutting the wood without forcing it backwards and forwards, just letting the teeth of the rather sharp saw rest and be pulled down by gravity into the wood.
And I cut through that wood so much more quickly and easily. You see, my dad used little or no words in that exchange. He just trusted the love and connection we had between us.
And I remember it to this day. When we trust love, our relationship doesn't become about things. It doesn't become about toys.
It doesn't become about playdates. And it absolutely does not become about screens and movies and video games. If we trust love, those things can be seen for what they are.
If we trust love, then we can find ourselves gently or firmly, but gently touching our children just that little bit more. When my kids were little, I made a little promise to myself that each time I entered the room when I had been away, you know, like working in my office or something, I wouldn't ever enter the room without just touching them. I've mentioned this before, I believe, you know, in podcasts.
Brushing their hair, a little bit of a squeeze of a shoulder, and that gentle touch and that very brief little flicker of eye contact that often was associated, that moment was a little moment of love. If we can trust love, we can simply be more, be more present, speak less, trust the space between us, and create that deeper connection with our children that we all so long for. So, I hope that's helpful.
It's a theme that is elusive and yet very, very deep. Trust love. As always, if you wish to speak to me personally, I love to do that.
And all you need to do is go onto our website, Simplicity Parenting, and just arrange a time and we can work through some of the things that are coming up for you personally in your family. All right, that's it for this week. Okay, bye-bye for now.
