Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week is the second part of a series of how loving limits define our family. Now last week I mentioned this passage in the biography of Michelangelo where he talked about how he didn't really carve the statue of David.
He took away that which was not of David. So he had this image. Do you remember listening to that part? Just as a quick reminder.
And I likened that to us applying limits and boundaries and discipline in our home that we have this value in the way we want our families to be. We have this image, even if it's a feel. And then when something happens that is really outside the shape of our family, that's when discipline and boundaries and limits need to be applied to actually uncover that image of who our family is.
All right, now that's a brief synopsis of last week. Now I wanted to sort of go on with this story a little bit because a little while ago I was visiting like an artist's enclave, I guess you would call it, a colony or where a number of artists had rented this former factory and had clubbed together. And it was just a beautiful place to be.
All kinds of glassblowers and visual artists and jewelry makers and metalsmiths of all sorts and ceramicists. But what I wanted to tell you about today was a marble carver. I had never seen anyone live carving marble before.
So it really caught my eye. And I stood there for the longest time and people came and went and came and went. And I just sort of made myself comfortable and was watching this woman carve this beautiful piece.
The day was starting to wrap up and she said, gosh, you've been there a long time. I hope I didn't seem like I was doing something weird. But I said, I'm just, that's amazing.
The patience you have and the way you go about it. And she said, yeah, it's a really, really interesting thing that I do, isn't it? And I said, yeah, but I notice you have some drawings there. And she said, yeah, they're my sketches for this series.
She was creating a series of sculptures. And I said, so, OK, so you do some design work, do you? And she said, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, like, I have a design.
And I said, so do you do you follow that design? And you can write, I'm thinking of Michelangelo. And she said, yeah, I do. But I've also got to see what the stone wants, where the grain is going, quote unquote, where the grain is going.
I thought, oh, gosh, I asked her, would you would you mind if I asked you about that? And she sat right on down. I said, no, no, no, no, of course. She said, look, when you carve something and you see you've got these drawings and what you want to do, and then you work with the grain of the stone and you get to places where the grain is not is not easily going to conform with what your drawing is all about.
And she said, and that's where the fun begins. And I said, really, it's fun. And she said, well, sometimes it's not fun, but but it's where, you know, really where the work is.
And now, you know, teaching and counseling and kids and families and parenting are never far from my mind. And so the wheels are starting to turn, you know, I'm thinking, all right. And she she spoke a little more and said, you know, it's it's like it's like the grain is going someplace and and you're going another place.
And how do those two things relate? And I said to her, well, what happens if you ignore the grain? And she said, that's what happens over there. And she pointed out a few broken sculptures. I said, so so it breaks.
And she said it can. Yeah. And I said, but what happens? Obvious question.
Next question. If you go too much with the grain, you just go with the grain. And she said, well, that's over there, too.
And we walked over and there was some sculptures sitting right there. She said, yeah, they're not very good, are they? And I thought they were OK. But she said, yeah, I don't even bother putting them up for sale because they're just kind of nothing much.
It's just amorphous. And she was quite kind of down on herself about it. And and we chatted for for for a little while longer.
And I I went away and I sat out in a little central courtyard and I was thinking about this, making some notes, you know, for for this podcast, actually made some notes about it. And I thought, you know, that's like that's like we have this vision. Like I mentioned last week, you know, like this is the vision of what we want for our family.
And then along come our kids with their own temperaments. Right. So we've got this vision and then we've got the grain, if I can put it that way, of who they are, of of just what they were born with.
And we've got their their whole disposition and the way they are. So this dance between this is how we want our family to be. And yet I'm going to reach out and and incorporate the grain of your temperament.
Let's say, for example, we have a very fiery little one born to us. And we've got this we've got this vision of a peaceful, quiet family. And this little this little volcano is born to us.
You know, she comes out the birth canal, rolling up her sleeves, you know, looking for looking for, you know, what what what can she conquer? And it's like, huh, there's going to be there's going to be some movement there. There's going to we are going to have to take that into account. There might be another little one who comes to us.
And and we've got this vision of of of, you know, a lovely, bubbly, lively family. And this little one comes to us and they're very quiet, very sensitive. And we've got this vision of wanting to travel and show them the world.
But it becomes clear very quickly that that would be very unsettling and even upsetting to the child. Right. Let's say we've got this sort of vision of, you know, of of being able to do new things and encounter.
And this child comes to us similarly, but loves being at home. And we love exploring. We're we're an outdoor family like you're you love the outdoors, canoeing and climbing and exploring.
And this child comes to just love. It's just a home body. It's like, hmm, OK, because, you know, if you keep doing that, it's going to be deeply upsetting.
And so to to a child on a fundamental level. So we've got and then I guess the last of these I mentioned, these temperaments, these four temperaments, you know, we we might have born to us a child who was just a papillon child, a hop and go skip and is easily distracted. And we're the kind of parent that just loves to finish things, start things and finish them and see something through.
We're very process oriented. And this child is not. There's there's our vision and our character, and there's the grain of theirs.
And that's the that's that's the beautiful dance, isn't it? There there it is, because if we go too much, just let their temperament, their disposition dominate our family. Then it ends up like this, this lovely sculptors, you know, structures that she showed me, her sculptures that were amorphous, that were shapeless, that weren't didn't have much form to them because it didn't meet any boundaries. It didn't meet anything of hers.
She just went with the grain too much. So this there's this dance between our kids' temperament and their grain and our vision of our family and what it's like to exist in the world, because that's what we're hoping to have our kids do. And the movement between the two of those is where the beauty of family life lies.
But it's also where our development lies. Right. That's that's that's our journey as well.
I hope. Is that good news? I don't know. It's it's but I hope that's helpful.
Bye bye for now.
