On one of our many trips to the library, my grandsons Archer, then just 4, and Waddy, just 2, picked out books they wanted me to read to them. Archer grabbed some dinosaur and animal storybooks; Waddy grabbed a Winnie the Pooh book.
When we got home, we sat on the floor and read aloud our treasures. One book told the story of how dinosaurs and all creatures evolved from sea animals coming ashore and developing legs and adaptive organs in order to live on land.
After reading it, I told Archer this might be a good book to share at show-and-tell with the other children, so they could talk about how the animals were sea animals before they were dinosaurs. Waddy listened, then shoved his Winnie the Pooh book in front of me to read. His turn!
Archer pushed Waddy’s book aside and said, “Waddy, that’s not important.” “It’s important to Waddy,” I said as I opened the cover to read Waddy his chosen book. Archer thought a minute.
“This is important,” Archer said pointing to the story of animal evolution. “This is cute,” he said, pointing to the book about Winnie the Pooh. The birth of discernment!
What’s important to me, to borrow Archer’s word, is always shifting, spiraling inward towards my core identity, my center, my authentic self. That’s because each year I peel away another level of awareness about my identity – why I’m here on this earth, my meaning, my purpose. I get in touch with and release energy in my body that was previously blocked, for whatever reason.
The sounds and species of birds on my morning walk, the welfare of and my delight in my family, the fragile balance of our endangered environment, whether or not I harness my creative instinct in a day – these are important to me. Whether or not my hair is graying, what I put on my back and what I eat for dinner is cute.
The adventures of Winnie the Pooh were once important to Archer. Age brought with it more challenging metaphors. Archer began building a hierarchy of what, for him, was “cute” and what was “important.” There’s room enough for both. Waddy’s fascination with Winnie the Pooh was appropriate for Waddy at 2 years old. What Archer suggests for us, who are further down the line of discernment, hopefully, is that it is important to name things for ourselves.
A fellow psychotherapist, Paula Reeves, puts it this way: “You’d better decide what matters to you before that becomes the matter with you.” If we do not discern what matters to us, our energy will go towards maintaining the cute in our life, draining away essential spiritual energy from what is important to our essence. The soul of us will become dry and brittle. This can show up as a physical symptom, as depression, or as a lingering case of the blahs.
I have to daily decide how I want to use my energy, for whom, and why. I have to make sure I get generous helpings of beauty, genuine expressions of love and a smattering of unexpected epiphanies in a day. I need time in nature, time with my thoughts, time with significant others, time to piddle, time for creativity and time for meaningful work. All these are important to me.
What is important to Archer and to Waddy get expressed in their language, at their stage of development. New energy is released with insight, developmental skills, spiritual experiences. Archer responded to Waddy’s killing a menacing bug with, “You don’t know about the Circle of Life yet, Waddy (a spiritual thread from the movie Lion King). You’ll learn about that.” Spiritual awareness has its own timing. We can not read one another’s heart.
Insights come slowly, through personal experience, through shared models of what is spiritually liberative and what is not. These intuitive processes thread their way through our center, our core, releasing new energy in us. This enables us to understand ourselves better, to “shed light” on our emerging character, to assist us in our effort to integrate our whole personality or psyche.
We learn to decipher the signs that point the way through the maze of our life. We learn to choose things that quiet our mind and fill our soul, like solitude and simplicity and soothing relationships. We get better at seeing universal patterns and truths as these unfold in our day to day. We become more familiar with and more open to experiences of wholeness.
All this is a lifetime process. It begins simple, as with Archer and Waddy’s choice of library books. We choose from the wide array of experiences that are offered us every day and prune away, slowly, those things that do not nourish us emotionally, spiritually. If we are not discerning, we take in too much clutter. The energy and direction we need to feel fulfilled in our own life gets drained from us. Our life becomes a parade of cute.
Now, with all this talk about important and cute, don’t get me wrong. When my 2-year-old Waddy wanted me to read him Winnie the Pooh, I was delighted. It was important to him, and that made it important to me.