Just the facts

I emailed a friend today whom I haven't seen since high school and asked the typical questions of, "where do you live, who'd you marry, what is your child's age" etc.  She responded with, "My life in a Nutshell"... I expected at least a paragraph or two describing how this or that came to be, what happened, etc., leading up to now.  But instead, she responded with a list of facts such as: high school, college, moved to this place, got married, made this career choice, then this one, divorced, moved, married again, kid.  I found this refreshing and so simple because there were no stories around any of it.  Just the facts.  Why I found this refreshing is because we all tend to weave our stories around things and the past then becomes our present just by the things we're regurgitating and the past does not need to be active any more than today can't be tomorrow.  The more we weave our stories, the more we tend to justify or explain why we got to where we are, or how we got to where we are and all of that is really quite irrelevant, because it's who you are now that matters.  Yes, you could say that you're a product of your past experiences and choices, certainly, but you don't have to continue viewing yourself from the same lens that you've always viewed yourself from, and by telling fewer stories about the past, you give way, or make way, for stories that are more based upon who you've become and the choices you want to make now about who you are.

Internal Source

There's nothing that I want more for my daughter than well-being and happiness.  I notice as she "goes out into the world and spreads her wings" (as a two year old does) that there are things I want to control for her, or that I have the tendency to want to control for her.  For instance, when she goes places where I'm not, she'll be offered different foods and she'll be exposed to different things than she would be offered or exposed to here at home or with me in general.  However I've come to my own conclusions about what to eat or what not to eat, or how to be or not to be, they are my conclusions.  And although I will ultimately influence her decisions to a certain extent, and influence her preferences and possibly her choices just by virtue of being in close proximity with her, what I really want her to know and feel is that she has her own guidance, her own "fog light" if you will, that shines brightly which will lead her to the best decisions for herself about herself.  We are bombarded with information these days from so many different sources, all of them external, and I want her to follow her internal source.  The one that says, "this is what's best for me", or "this is what's true for me", regardless of what my mom, my dad, my peers, my community, the magazines, the tv., the internet, the "experts" say, because there's no better expert of Franki, than Franki....even if she is only two years old.  And you know what, she likely knows this better than I do already.