Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Ken John Payne. This is a special series of follow-ups to the television series Live from San Quarantine that Jewel very kindly invited me on to speak and to appear. And I promised I would follow up a lot of the questions and group them together and do my best, very best, to answer them.
One of the themes, very understandably, that came up repeatedly in the very large number of questions that were posted both during and after the TV show was around anxiety, around restlessness, around this feeling of helplessness. The show as a whole has been about mental health and how to maintain our own inner equilibrium. And so the fact that these questions came up was, again, very, very understandable.
One of the things in working without children, because the focus of this show on this episode was on home life and children, is this balance, equilibrium and giving children a message that all is well, that we are fine, that we're going to find a way through this, that this too shall pass. And one of the things that Jewel mentioned that really struck a note for me was this sentence that she repeated, that she said she was talking about with her little boy when he was worried and he was hearing things from his friends about it. And she said with this biggest, beautiful smile, when she said, You know, we are humans.
And you know what? We were made for this. And I just kind of chuckled and cheered and hooted all at once, really, because that is exactly the message. We need to, if we can, reach back into our very recent past and remember that we've all been through the recession back not so long ago.
And before that, there was wars. There were our parents and grandparents went through global conflicts. There have been difficulties on a worldwide scale in the past, not just a couple of months or two or three of social distancing and self-quarantine for some.
We have faced much, much worse. I get it that this enemy, so to speak, as some people have called it, is invisible. And that has a whole extra layer of anxiety within it.
But we have been through these things before and we have come out and we have figured out ways to deal with this. And we have found our way through it. You know, since then, I've also spoken to many, many dozens of parents, as I do every single day now.
I still am very active with my own private family counseling practice. So I've been mentioning this to parents. They've been getting back to me.
And they've been saying, we've also been telling stories of family hardship, about when we went through it as a family. Things that I went through as a little girl. Things that happened to us, to the children's grandparents, that they went through.
And they've been bringing it, in a sense of being rather than global, they've been bringing it home, particularly to children, and making it more local. Making it local to them, right to their very family. And I'd highly recommend you do this, because the feedback from the parents has been extremely positive.
That when you tell children stories of hardship, and you make it through, and that there have been difficult times in our lives as a family, as a mum, as a dad. You can tell stories from your own biography as well, of course. And this feeling of we are humans, we are made for this, is just a really beautiful message to bring to children, as much as we possibly can.
I was reminded in the TV show, although it didn't seem in the flow to mention it, but if I may, I'll mention it now, is that as a young man, in only my first year of college, I heard about a Maori tribe in New Zealand. This was when I was living and growing up in Australia. And New Zealand is a different country, folks.
It's not Australia. And I asked if I could go and live for a short time in a pretty remote area with this group of people, because I was struck by their tribal justice system and how they handled tough times. And I remember going to their meetings when things that had happened, when people had transgressed the tribal rules and understandings, or when they were facing tough times in one way or another.
And a man who was, I guess we might call him the holder of the spirit or life of the tribe, the shaman, whatever word works for us. But he would open each meeting with a chant. And the chant would always be about the hardships going all the way back into what we would perhaps call mythological times.
And he would say something that went wrong and that was hard. And the refrain from all the people gathered was, and we went on. This was in the Maori language, of course.
And we went on. Everyone would say it. And then he would say another hardship coming forward in time.
And he would pause and everyone would say, and we went on. And then he would start talking about the coming rapidly forward into modern times at the European invasion of their homeland and of the hardships that disease and alcohol brought to their homeland. And he would pause and people would say, and we went on.
And he would bring it all the way up into modern times of all the hardships. And there was this refrain. I was so struck by Jewel's comment, we are human.
We were made for this. Because immediately this image of, and we went on, came back to me in a flash. This message of, yes, there are hardships and we're not going to deny it.
Yes, there are tragedies on a global scale, regional and a family level, and we're not going to deny it. But we were made for this and we will go on. If we can bring that message to our children in our own words, in whatever way we bring it, it might be just in our own gestalt, our own gesture, just what we carry inwardly, there'll be a quiet message of perhaps positivity, perhaps a quiet message of hope, perhaps a looking forwardness.
And as long as we're doing that, it will counterbalance our fear and anxiety. It doesn't attempt to whitewash it, deny it, because it's there. It is there.
Economically, what are we going to do? How are we going to recover? How am I going to pay the mortgage? How do we, the bills keep coming in? A lot of anxiety. But this message of, we are human and we were made for this. And I would add to that, and we go on, offers a counterbalance.
And our children will sense it and they can come closer to us and will be comforted by it, feel more secure and safe. I sure hope that helps. Okay, bye bye for now.
