Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, the author. This week we're going to look at some really rather fascinating research that came my way some years ago but keeps coming up in my thinking, particularly as I'm working on a new book right now and I was writing about it this week and this is the research of Joseph Chilton Pearce. I was at a lecture he gave years ago where he talked about a single cell of a heart.
If a heart cell on a petri dish is beating, but because of the isolation of it, it will begin to fibrillate. In other words, it'll begin to die. And if another cell from a completely different heart is put near the dying heart cell, not even touching it, but just within a proximal distance, like nearby, the dying heart cell will come out of its fibrillation, will start to beat, but its beat will be in the same rhythm as the second cell that was put nearby.
And now the two heart cells start to beat synchronistically. And the metaphor here just struck me so much is that with our family life, if we focus on family life, if a child is feeling isolated, if a human being is feeling isolated, but in this case, if someone in our family is feeling alone, and you can, in a sense, join with them, then so much is achieved. And the way I was interpreting this and speaking with Joe about what he was talking about after the lecture, is that it's, for me, the hopeful part of this, the uplifting part of this, is that one doesn't really need to have magical answers for every situation that comes up in life.
We don't have to be brilliant parents. We don't have to always have an answer, always be on our A game. We don't have to know every aspect of our child's psyche, of, we don't need to have every piece of a child diagnosed.
We don't have to sort of pathologize children. What we need to do is, is just be with them, be really with them, get close to them. And that kind of aloneness and that kind of feeling that they can have at times in their life, or any human being can have, can be eased.
Because I'm often asked, as I move around various communities, about the growing anxiety and fear amongst children, this rising tide of anxiety. And again, I'm reminded of Joe's lecture, and what he later wrote about in his book, Transcendent Biology, of this picture of the two beating heart cells. I think more and more, our children are experiencing that they're needing to make their way in life in a sense alone.
There's so many filters now that get between us and our kids. Recently, I was speaking to one group of parents, and they were really struck by the amount of filters, of friction that exists between them and their kids. And a huge part of, I think, why our kids as a society wide now, there's upswing in anxiety, is that we're just trying to do too much.
In the doing, we are not being. We need to be more and do less. It's such a basic concept.
Be more, do less. Because if we can be more with our children, then that feeling of isolation, which causes that sort of fibrillation, which I'm relating to this picture of anxiety and stress and nervousness, which is becoming such a problem now, will be eased. Am I claiming that that will, you know, is a magic cure-all? Well, kind of not, but kind of yes.
Because when we are with our children, when we can be that second heart cell and be proximal, be near our children, then those two single cells, which alone would both die, would both fibrillate, would both suffer from isolation, can start to beat together. So if your child is experiencing anxiety, if your child is experiencing fear, or moreover, if you don't wish for your child to go down that path, be with them more. Dial it back.
Give them more time just to hang out with you, just to do the simple little things which are so often overlooked now in our hurry to give our kids a head start. What we're doing is creating a society of children, who of course will grow into teens and adults, who suffer from all kinds of anxieties and isolations, and isolation because we're trying to get them ahead. If we really want our children to get ahead, we can give them that firm base, that secure foundation under their feet.
And the great news, it's not just good news, the great news about that is actually we don't have to, we don't have to do anything extra at all. We just need to be and not do. I hope that's helpful.
Okay, bye-bye for now.
