SISTER WISDOM

Cape optional.

Habit & Routine

Habit and Routine make the daily things that need to be done automatic and easy. No more wearing your mental capacity out on a hundred mundane tasks and decisions. Form a habit, and line your habits up into a routine, and the daily needs are being taken care of on auto-pilot. You can compose poetry in your head while you go through the routine. Habits and routines give you the mental freedom to focus on the bigger decisions, the priorities, without neglecting the daily things that keep life in order.

“Even little children, are much like the rest of us and infinitely prefer to have some regular definite task…”
“Habit…renders action easier, through practice begets skill and accuracy, and lessens fatigue. It minimizes the need of conscious control, and sets the mind free from attention to familiar details, so that it may give itself to new and higher things. It makes learning of all sorts possible, and is responsible even for the calling to mind of our ideas and memories. It enables one to store up capital day after day, and to establish his life upon increasingly sure foundations; there is no more indispensable service that we can render to our children than to help them form right, wholesome, useful habits” (from The Training of Children in the Christian Family).

Creativity

Creativity is a natural and strong force within each and every person and it is only through bad habits, lack of training, laziness, and lack of confidence that we muffle the creative voice. I hope I never hear that phrase again: “Oh, I’m not really a creative person.” Hogwash. Snort. Creativity is demanded in life, and you’ve got as good a dose as anyone.

Creativity is telling a story, singing a song, cooking a dinner, hanging the picture in just the right place, drawing a silly face on the grapefruit, picking a bunch of daffodils for the windowsill, putting together a perfect outfit, writing a sentence. The more creativity you put into your life, the more fun you will have and the less bound you will be by circumstances.
I have a future post planned for talking about how to bring creativity out more every day, as a person & as a Mom, for yourself and for your children. For now, I’ll leave you with this quote:
“The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything” (Abraham Maslow).

Resourcefulness

If you’ve ever had a diaper emergency on an outing – the kind with a five-alarm poop and only one wipe – then you know the meaning of the word resourcefulness, in all its gritty real-life application. (Ahem. Excuse me while I go wash my hands just at the thought of things I’ve done that I never thought I’d do.) Resourcefulness is coming up with dinner when your cupboards have already been plundered and it’s not payday yet. Resourceful moms come up with toys from the strange things that accumulate inside their purses, make games out of the cars going by, and just in general find ways to get more out of life than you’d think might be possible.

Teaching kids to be resourceful is really not necessary. Kids are resourceful. They haven’t memorized the “correct use and procedure” for all the stuff that surrounds them, so they make do with whatever is there for whatever purpose they have in mind. The thing to work at is our Mommish tendency to squelch that resourcefulness by intervening whenever things aren’t easy for our kids (thus removing the need for resourcefulness) and by over-emphasizing “the right way” at the wrong time. Sometimes there is no right way; there are just many different ways.

“No child is naturally passive. If we can avoid forcing him into passivity in his early childhood, we need have no fears as to his capacity later to look out for himself. …There is no surer beginning for the habit of self-help than the consistent training of the capacity for it” [In other words, give kids a chance to do it for themselves before you jump in and do it for them] (Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Self-Reliance).

Consistency

If you want a happy, well-adjusted child… If you want to be happy and well-adjusted yourself… If you want to enjoy life more… If you want to accomplish your goals…. If you want to not go crazy… (or crazier, as the case may be)… you need consistency. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Be clear. Be brief. Follow through.

Your child is depending on you to define the world for her. Is it an orderly place with logical consequences? Is it a place where there is right and wrong, and no matter what, we must do what is right? Or is it a place of shifting standards? Is it a place of absolutes or of relativism? The one absolute that our children need more than any other is the absolute of obedience. And the only way to teach obedience is to be consistent. Day in, day out. Good day, bad day. Sick day, well day. God gives instruction to little children on only two points: to obey and to honor their parents. Who am I to negate the instruction of God by allowing my child to get away with disobedience?
Ouch, ouch, ouch. This hurts. I’m moving on to the next one now.

Passion

If there’s one word modern Mommies know, it’s balance. Get balance. Achieve balance. Find balance. Maintain balance. Life and work balance, rest and play balance, self and others balance, blah blah blah. What does that even mean? Has anyone ever achieved it? I think the world needs a little less striving-after-balance and a lot more passionately pursuing.

People who are passionate about something are on fire, energetic, unstoppable. When you are passionately pursuing what fires up your heart, you are teaching your little people all sorts of great lessons, like how to be flexible, how to be creative, how to love what you do, how to give back, how to help others, how to learn, how to create, how to be self-disciplined…

Passion is a lot like creativity. We refer to certain people as “passionate” and then, well, there’s the rest of us. Hogwash again, I say. What we really mean when we say that is that other people show their emotions more obviously. That’s not the same thing as passion. A passion is something that drives you, something you get so into that time disappears. Every person has a passion, often more than one or two or ten. Saying you’re not passionate or not creative is just saying you’re not sure who you are.