inklingfair I have this peculiar habit of keeping articles I like re-reading open in my mobile browser until I tire of them. I used to bookmark them on Feedly until I realized I kept forgetting to revisit stories I saved, and by the time I got back to them, they had ceased being relevant to me. Today, before I close the current tabs, I thought I’d try to jot down why they make so much sense to me right now.
1. How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
It’s been trial and error dealing Amy at this age—sometimes she surprises us picking up after herself or brushing her teeth without anyone reminding her, and sometimes we verbally tussle over making her eat dinner or change out of pyjamas. We often read that at this age, they’re testing their boundaries or trying to see how far they can get before we blow up, but the Inuit believe they’re simply “upset about something, and you have to figure out what it is.” And without yelling—because children learn emotional regulation from parents who show they are in control of their emotions.
Instead, the Inuit use storytelling and playful role-playing dramas to teach life skills and knowledge, like many contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. “With the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population of the Philippines, good storytelling skills are prized more than hunting skills or medicinal knowledge, the study found.”
This was an eye-opener for me: The stories and playacting help children to practice being emotionally resilient; “to not take everything so seriously or to be scared of teasing”; to be prepared when they have to deal with the “big feelings” when they come. It isn’t about tamping down these big emotions, but helping them feel in control of how they react. It reminds me a bit of Mister Rogers’ “What Do You Do With The Mad That You Feel?”
2. Someone Is Hidden in this Dark
This poem sums up how I feel about Advent, and the three days of burial and waiting before Easter, too:
Advent by Jessica Powers I live my Advent in the womb of Mary. And on one night when a great star swings free from its high mooring and walks down the sky to be the dot above the Christus i, I shall be born of her by blessed grace. I wait in Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place, with hope’s expectance of nativity. I knew for long she carried me and fed me, guarded and loved me, though I could not see. But only now, with inward jubilee, I come upon earth’s most amazing knowledge: someone is hidden in this dark with me.
Before I came across this poem, I had read about the part Joseph played “as an active agent of God’s Wisdom, hidden in a mystery“:
“…it is by refusing to conquer Satan by revealing His identity as Only-Begotten of the Father, but by emptying that identity into hiddenness, into His identity as Joseph’s son, into His place in the genealogy of Joseph, that Jesus catches all of our genealogies up into true life, the Book of Life… Mary is the link with our flesh, and Joseph is the link with our identities.”
– John Cavadini, The Sex Life of Joseph and Mary (emphases mine; it’s quite the clickbait title, but the actual content does deliver)
Isn’t that thrilling? That we are in on a secret on the brink of revelation; that “in this new and final birth, we will grasp the heel of the One who waits in the darkness with us.”
3. The man who wrote the most perfect sentences ever written
I loved the Jeeves stories so much back in college that I snapped up every book I ever saw. Jeeves was the Tiffany’s to my Holly Golightly: whenever I was feeling down, I read a Jeeves story for comfort; nothing very bad could happen to you in one. And no wonder: P.G. Wodehouse had one ambition: to bring “sweetness and light” to his readers.
This made me think, too: Why do I write? I love discovering how seemingly random things link up and work with each other (Exhibit A: Open Tabs). I enjoy tossing ideas in a mixing bowl and seeing which ones taste good together. And when one of my experiments results in something delightful (at least to me), I write it down. I write for the same reason I read (and re-read): to make sense of things—or rather, to make things make sense for me.
Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash
