Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. I've been musing over something a friend said to me some time ago. He's a family therapist and he was talking to me about the many meetings he has with families on a day-to-day basis.
A lovely, kind gentleman, I have a lot of respect for him, and he was saying, you know what your book, Simplicity Parenting, has really given me, sort of like a voice, I think he said something like that, to be able to express to the people I meet with is that of the flow and the overwhelm that's coming into their lives. And I was really pleased that this had helped him as a therapist, and he said, yeah, yeah, but it's the image that comes to me is that there's this tap turned on, and it's turned on too hard, and it's flowing into these vessels, into these cups, and I'm paraphrasing here of course, and this cup is called family life, and this pouring is coming into it, like it's a tap turned on really hard, and he said, you know, what we tend to do as a society, as a family, if that's happening to our family or our child, is that we are madly mopping up, and the tap is flowing in, and we're just trying to cope with all the pressures of daily life, and he was using this metaphor of too much water flowing into a vessel as a metaphor describing too much input, too many playdates, too many sports clubs, too many books, too many toys, too much media, too many images, and he was saying it's all too much, and it's pouring into a vessel that can't hold it, and he said, and it's flowing out of the edges, and it's making a mess, and he said, we've either got a choice, we either quit mopping up, or we either mop up, you know, madly mop up, or we quit mopping up, and we just simply turn down the tap, and I let out a great sort of, you know, laugh when he said that, because it's so perfect, it's just such a perfect image. Do we spend year after year mopping up and trying to cope with the too muchness of family life, and all the new normal of the sort of super-sized life that we're supposed to lead these days, and, or, do we put our hand on the tap, and just turn it down, so that what comes into that vessel can actually be contained, can be, one can drink from that vessel, and receive nourishment from it, and have it hydrate us, you know, to continue the metaphor now, have it be nutritional, have it serve us, because there's the right amount coming in, to the right amount of input coming into what, the container, or do we spend our lives furiously mopping up, in which case there's very little nutrition, we're not drinking of anything, we're just coping, and that thought, you know, really struck me as one of the very best metaphors, and I said to him, how does it go, you know, when you speak to the parents that you work with about this, and he said, it's perfect, it's like a perfect way of looking at it, that gives us a beachhead, gives us a starting point into, you know, to land, and to be able to say, okay, you know, how do we, how do we turn the tap down? How do we do that? Can we put our hands on the faucet, on the tap, and what are the ways in which we can dial it back? And that's different for, for every single person, that's different.
But I wonder if we could all pause and think, you know, is this a week where I've been just mopping up? Is this a week where I've just been coping? Or is this a week where I've been drinking, and when I've been able to take that vessel of daily life and actually gain nourishment from it? So was I drinking? Or was I mopping? And if it's a mopping up week, then really put, put our hands on the family tap and just turn the flow down and say, okay, how is next week going to be different from this week? Because I don't want to spend two weeks in a row just coping and just mopping up. And that for me gave me a way of thinking about that, that was very, very doable. And I hope I really hope that this is this is a helpful thought for you too.
Okay, thanks. Bye bye now.
