Parenting Tips: Enjoying the Stillness

This morning it was foggy when we all woke up and the world was still for a moment.  Not long, because of course the bus would come fog or not, breakfast needed to be made, fog or not, and children will argue, fog or not.  But for a moment the world was still.  It was a deliciouos stillness and made me wonder whether I have done a good enough job of teaching my children to enjoy stillness. I don't mean sitting still, physically still, although that would be a challenge for several of mine.  But in this case I mean the stillness of sound.  I am resolving to challenge my children [and myself!] to find a time in each day when we can be still.  No phone, no iPods, no video games or Wii or TV. Not even fun family games.  Not even happy noise. Not even prayer or meditation. Just a time to be still.  To hear the way fog mute even the sounds of nature. To hear the tiny sounds of a building when the people inside are still. To find that stillness consciously each and every day.

I started googling for pictures of stillness and discovered an abundance of rural images, water images, and the like.  Finding city images of stillness was more difficult.  I found a home interior painting titled Stillness in the paintings of nick patten [check them out!]. I found one of the stillness of a night watchman in the UK. I even found one of a particularly determined office worker finding stillness amid chaos. [This last was in an article about a computer app that sends you a reminder to take a moment to be still!] The popularity of calendars, photos, and paintings of nature's stillness shows that we can even lose ourselves in the image of stillness. But I think finding stillness in some way is probably a crucial skill and one which we need to deliberately teach ourselves and our children. Children are born able to lock out the world's noise and find stillness.  We seem to lose that ability as we age. We need to recapture that ability to make a small island of stillness amid the world's noise.

So, no nifty strategy this morning.  No trick about chores or homework or stopping sibling arguments.  Just a tip that I need myself. A tip that in our noisy world, our hectic lives, we need to give our children the experience, the resource, and the joy of stillness.  That we should not wait until a blanket of fog descends on us as reminder, but as a regular, healthy part of life. Join me?

photo credit: http://www.deliciousmusings.com/?cat=11