On equanimity and bedtime routines
Perfection isn’t on offer. But with time, it becomes easier to remember our better selves and our wiser goals.
This is it, y’all, the first official mini-essay of the Fatherhood Is Learning newsletter! Welcome to all who have signed up during the past week, and welcome to all who will join us in the future. Let’s learn together.
Doing the dishes in the evening is when I do much of my podcast-listening. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and talks about philosophy, meditation, mindfulness, and ethics. I’ve especially appreciated the daily dharma talks produced by the Insight Meditation Center (IMC) in Redwood City, California, which has done incredible online work during the pandemic.
One night this past August, I was doing the dishes and listening to a talk by meditation teacher Matthew Brensilver on the topic of equanimity. Brensilver, among other things, was formerly Program Director at the organization Mindful Schools, and this was the first in a series of talks on equanimity that he would give that week through IMC.
As I was scrubbing some dish or another, Brensilver said something that sent a jolt of recognition between my gut and my head. He described equanimity as the capacity to live in balance despite “not getting the promises that craving makes; not getting the promises that greed makes; that hatred makes.” In other words, when events diverge from our preferences, we can learn to engage with the real possibilities of the situation as it is, rather than clinging jealously to how we wish things were and acting from that jealousy. This balance depends on our learning to hold our own preferences lightly in the moment: as Brensilver says, “We may still have our preferences, but there is not a compulsion to enact them in the world.”1
Memories of impatient moments flooded the mental space that Brensilver’s comments had opened before me. Foremost among these, I found myself reflecting on times when I’d gotten impatient with my kids for meandering too distractedly through the evening bedtime routine, my voice nagging them all along the way to start a shower, put on pajamas, brush teeth, and all the rest.
The bedtime routine is simultaneously one of the most beautiful and one of the trickiest times in my family’s day, at least for me. Our singing and snuggles, the unexpected disclosures about things that happened during our kids’ days at school, and our reading stories together—both us reading to the kids and our kids reading to us—are deeply meaningful and sometimes luminous moments, and I look forward to them. These are moments when I feel my body settle.
At the same time, depending on the events of the day, one or all of us might be quite tired or even over-tired. When that’s the case, the kids get sidetracked more easily from the steps of the bedtime routine, things take longer, and patience—my patience, especially—runs shorter. With each reminder I give my kids about things not yet done, I feel greater tension in my shoulders and my scalp. As I wrote in the essay “Learning To Forgive the Man I Don’t Want To Be,” repetition is a springboard to anxiety for me, and when I’m feeling tired, I’m more likely to simply want that uncomfortable feeling to stop, and my body feels pulled forward into another, even more impatient reminder. I become anything but equanimous.
Back to Brensilver: equanimity is living in balance despite “not getting the promises that craving makes.” With those words, I suddenly saw my sometimes-impatient bedtime behavior clearly: in such moments, I was jealously holding fast to a vision of how the evening bedtime routine “should” go, how quickly, and how unbothered I “should” be along the way. That “should” was the voice of craving, pulling me away from curious engagement with the moment.
Moreover, the driving force of that “should” was not some well-founded and achievable standard for how the bedtime routine should go. Rather, I clung to a self-defeating wish: that things not yet done, whether showering or brushing teeth, should already be done, such that my ease in the moment would never have been disturbed in the first place.
This is an impossible standard. It has nothing to do with what’s really going on in the present. Moreover, it contains an unfair judgment, for it presumes that my kids have failed and become obstacles in the flow of my own experience, rather than people with whom I want and need to connect, about whom there are things I probably need to understand more deeply, and with whom I can creatively get things done. Brensilver’s words cut through the noise and exposed this uncomfortable truth.
Perhaps you experience impatient parenting moments like this, too, at some predictable point in your family’s day. If so, it’s useful to take some time explicitly to reflect and ask yourself:
What preference about how things “should” be are you clinging to in that moment?
What happens in your body when that preference and the reality of the situation clash? Where do you feel the discomfort? What does your voice sound like?
When you act from your discomfort, are you enforcing a standard that your kids can actually meet in practice, with help and support? Or are you making a tacit judgment that presumes failure?
How might you approach the situation differently in the future, with a clearer eye toward the possible? What options can you suggest? Are there steps you could take together proactively, in advance, to support your kid? Could you participate in a new way? And what might you learn if you got curious about your kid’s perspective? Is there something important that you don’t yet understand?
This kind of reflection, done during a moment of calm—when we can assess ourselves honestly and kindly, without fear of losing face—helps us practice for when such moments arise again, as they will. It helps us recognize the discomfort early, before we’re well down the path of impatience. We are priming our bodies and our minds to remember who we want to be.
You can practice through meditation, journaling, taking a walk, or whatever medium provides for an honest dialogue with yourself. For me, meditation helps me recall and become familiar with places of discomfort in my body, and writing helps me analyze events with an eye toward how my actions square with my higher goals for being a dad.
Whatever practices work best for you, the goal is to recognize our underlying preferences and our discomfort and clinging for what they are, as they well up in the moment, and let these be spurs to mindful engagement with things as they are, rather than toward jealous craving and aversion.
Perfection isn’t on offer. But with time, it becomes easier to remember our better selves and our wiser goals—and, more importantly, to hold connection with our kids and understanding their needs at the center of our concern. But to get there, we have to put in the work. We need to practice.
Matthew Brensilver, “Equanimity (1 of 5): Introduction,” AudioDharma, Insight Meditation Center, Redwood City, California. https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/13983