Words that caught me: Y is for Yes!
The little one has developed a strange habit
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| Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash |
That I desperately want to kill.
He has been saying a lot of No’s
And too often.
‘No’ has become his default answer
To almost everything —
To his food,
To changing clothes,
To going to bed,
To greeting people….
May be its typical for children his age,
As they push and test the boundaries of independence
…but I doubt.
I think I’m partly to blame.
I suspect we have been telling him an equally many No’s,
As we tried to wad him from danger,
In his zest to explore the magic and wonder around him.
I suspect that our good intentions
May have been internalized,
And morphed into this No-ish monstrosity.
I suspect we have been feeding the beast all along
Albeit unknowingly —
Hence my desperation to kill it.
You might see this as a small, trivial
And mundane matter
That shouldn’t occupy my time and yours,
Or so many words….
I hear that.
I understand that.
“The simplest answer, of course, is just to say no.
Then you’re off the hook….
When you say no, nothing happens at all.
Mostly, people say no.
Most of their lives, most people just walk around,
day after day, saying no, no, no, no, no.”
So I know I sound ridiculous
To be desperate
In wanting to kill the damn beast.
But I must.
…because i want the best for him
And i also know something else —
That nothing will happen in his life
If ‘No’ remains his default answer.
Magic happens
Only when we say Yes!
*This poem was inspired by a passage in Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.
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