full on

It is not generally a good sign when the blog is silent for so long. It tends to mean that either nothing at all is going on in my life, or there is far far too much going on in my life. This has been a far-too-much time. And it’s funny, isn’t it, the way life works. After 10 days of full-on work, with me go go going all of my waking hours, I have come to find myself sitting on the floor of the Rotorua airport, plane cancelled, people trying to figure out what to do with us next (the last plane tonight is already full in this tiny airport), and nothing at all to do. Isn’t life funny that way?

I have been planning and then teaching a couple of leadership development programmes and then writing and delivering a speech. Each of these pieces is another root in the soil here, another beginning at building something here. And each is an open door with no clear sense of what might happen next. In the whole world, I think, we don’t know what’s going to happen next. The thing that strikes me is that not knowing what’s going to happen next isn’t catching me anymore. Do we move back to the US? When? Who knows. Will we ever sell the Ocean Road house? Who knows. Will I get another contract for this leadership development work or any future contacts from this speech today? Who knows. It’s all feeling so impossible to understand that I can hardly even bother trying anymore. Instead I’ll bump bump into the clouds and hope to come down safely on the other side.

One of the things that happened in this busy time was that it was the first time one of my kids was hurt by another kid at school. It was in many ways, exactly the way you think it would be with Aidan. From multiple accounts, it was a whole system effect. Naomi was teased at lunch and tattled on the teaser. The teaser didn’t like it and became agitated with Naomi. Aidan came over to check on the agitation. The teaser’s big brother (and this fellow is seriously big, a head taller than Naomi even) got involved and told Naomi of his displeasure at the fact that she had tattled. Aidan piped up that he didn’t want his sister talked to that way. And then the big boy, who has a long-standing problem with violence, knocked Aidan to the ground and kicked him twice in the back, hard. I got a call from the principal at the close of the first of my many events last week, and madly checked in with all players. Aidan was sore. Naomi was shaken. Rob and Michael were angry. And I ached with all the pain of it all.

We talked and talked about the incident and about what was going on there. Aidan was anxious about this boy seeing him again when he came back to school after the suspension. Naomi was anxious about whether Aidan might be seriously hurt from the kicking and pleaded for us to take him to the doctor. She was feeling at least a little responsible because it was her tattling that made the boy angry at her in the first place. We tried to take the various pieces in turn. Off Aidan went to the doctor, to have a variety of precautionary and non-invasive tests to see whether his kidneys had suffered from the blows (they hadn’t). Naomi, suddenly realising that she was not the centre of attention, began complaining and carrying on. All of us were shaken, all needing to connect with one another and hold on to the fact that while something really bad could have happened, nothing really bad actually did happen.

Naomi and Aidan were amazingly gentle with one another for the next few days. I would walk into the living room and find them sitting tightly next to each other, reading silently. We turned toward talking about how Aidan was feeling about the boy, about whether he was afraid of him or angry at him., and what he would do when the boy apologised. “I already know what I’m going to say, Mom,” he told me. What? “I forgive you?”

I keep thinking that I have already reached the height of the love I can feel for these people, but it turns out that there are moments—filled with joy or filled with fear or filled with angst—that increase my love. And as these children grow, I find that my love and admiration for them grow as well. And it turns out that even in this busy time, everything is growing in Paekakairki.