The wellspring of connection
Working through discord, part 7: On rhythms of rest and return
This is the last in my series of pieces on working through discord, and I want to conclude by reflecting on the larger story of connection that lies at its foundation.
Through the past half-year, I’ve been learning how deeply my kids’ shared need for connection with one another underlies the movements of their everyday lives, including during periods of conflict between them.
I used to get horribly frustrated by the fact that, once engaged in a conflict, neither of my kids would walk away and cool down. They’d keep at it, the temperature increasing, until I would mandate a period of rest, often with considerable frustration of my own.
But a funny thing would happen whenever the kids would finally retire to their rooms for a bit. Shortly thereafter, they’d begin passing notes to each other beneath their respective bedroom doors. Though they were, technically, observing a temporary period of rest, their need to connect could not be contained therein. It called them back to each other, and their collaboration would begin anew, as rest gave way to return.
I now understand that my kids’ need for connection with one another is one of the most powerful forces in their lives. Even in the midst of an escalating conflict that they don’t know how to navigate, they cannot bear to turn away from each other. And when a parent calls for a time of rest to cool down, scarcely minutes pass before the need for connection springs forth and reasserts itself as a sweet longing for return.
I’m awed by my kids’ connection, and I hope it will sustain them throughout their lives. And I better understand now that the deepening of their connection over time is founded, in part, on resolving the periodic frictions and conflicts that necessarily arise.
My job as a parent, as I now understand it, is to hold and shape a trustworthy space for deepening connection over time, in which my kids can learn to:
Appreciate their mutual need for connection with one another as the singular gift that it is; and
Build their practical repertoire for taking moments of rest when needed and returning to one another with renewed curiosity, in the larger service of tending their connection and growing through it.
Simply put, it’s a better, more-trustworthy world when you recognize that your home contains a deep wellspring of connection that is always present. This wellspring flows beneath all other things, drawing us together in joy and calling us to return after periods of rest. And when we act from this wellspring, it gives us a gift: a life-giving and merciful lens through which to learn about each other’s intentions and needs.
This goes for parents, too. As a parent, acting from this wellspring clarifies and nourishes my perception. It calls me to respond with hope and wiser intention, knowing that my children are imperfect but deeply-loving beings. Through this lens, the reactive urge to control conflict and push away its discomforts, as if my kids were a burden to my own equanimity, becomes untenable as a way of living.
This not-easy journey of communion, conflict, and faithful return has another name: love.
Love is neither neat nor compliant. As the Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Sean Parker Dennison puts it, love calls us to “watch as the breath of life scatters everything / you have only just folded and put away.”1
So may it be, for this is how we learn to draw closer, with deeper trust.
Sean Parker Dennison, “To Invoke Love,” in Breaking and Blessing: Meditations, Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2020, pg. 12.