How do you know when to be anxious and when to let go, especially when it is about our children when they are ready to fly the nest?
It is not easy to strike a balance when it comes to the most important people in the world, our children, and that is perfectly normal. It is because we care, sometimes a little too much, but we care, and we love, and we cherish and we want to keep them safe from the world.
But, and here it comes, children are ours, true, but they are also their own beings, their own people, their own souls with their own destinies to fulfil and their own mistakes to make. As Khalil Gibran wrote:
Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.Â
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.
Once we can relinquish our need to love and protect which can easily turn to control and mould, we will see tour children blossom into the beings they are meant to be. Without our need to shape them or identify their path for them.
They are all individual souls that came here with a mission and a purpose and when we restrict them with suffocating love, we do dis-service to them, we don’t allow them to fly.
Trust the process, trust that when they do leave home, they will be okay. They will fall, yes, they will get hurt, yes, they will have pain, yes. Our only job is to love them from far and unconditionally. For all that we think we still need to do, in fact, we don’t. Let us befriend our children and become their allies and a steady rock in their lives. That is where love begins.
Photo courtesy: Photo by luizclas on pexels
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