Letting the Spider Go

Day 58, 09:10am, 27 February 2019

Little Miss and I are walking to Brownies, when we spot a large bush bursting with white blossom. I clock it and think that's pretty, and carry on without so much as diluting my walking pace. But when it catches Little Miss' attention, it grabs her full attention. Her response is to stop, reach out and touch it. She pulls her face in tight toward it and exclaims at its beauty. It is a brief stop, but for that moment, she directs every piece of her focus and all of her senses onto that blossom. She really experiences it, ingests it and moves on, not my cursory nod.

She is a little worrier. There is a spider at Brownies. She gets upset. And when I meet her, it is the first thing she tells me about. I get her freaking out at spiders. I have to fight it myself, but time has taught me to supress my fears because my cold, logical brain tells me they are irrational. She has yet to develop that capacity, if it is a capacity. Her emotional heart is the victor. So she ruminates about the little blighter on the way, despite the fact, as I remind her, there is now a distance of two streets between us and the spider. 

I tell her about mindfulness and suggest that rather than continuing to think about the spider, she acknowledge she is frightened of it, be curious about how that makes her feel and then say to herself it is okay and let the thought go. She goes quiet, before she ventures, "Do we still have the thing that you put your hand in and all your worries go away?" I nod. "Good," she says wholeheartedly, "That is all I need."