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Control your concern

I was reminded recently of a helpful distinction Stephen Covey made in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I’ve recreated below:

In the universe of our cares, there are things we can control, things we can influence, and things that concern us, but which we can’t do anything about. Common sense suggests that our energy, creativity, and time is best spent on the innermost circle, with effort applied to the middle circle as interest and opportunity allow.

It suggests we bring order to the little parts of the world we control. That we make beauty and peace where we can.

The challenge is that in stressful times, our emotional energy gets drawn to the outer circle. The things we can’t control start to dominate our thoughts. In the present crisis that’s obvious: people worry for their jobs and financial assets. They worry people they love will get sick. They fear needing a ventilator themselves.

And to compound the cruelty, our obsession with what we can’t control prevents us from doing what’s needed in the domains we can control. We begin to fail our colleagues, our friends, our families. When we dwell on the things we can’t control, we become our worst selves.

The good news is that we can control how much we obsess over what we can’t control. We can govern our thoughts. We can restrict how often we check the news or our investments. We can dial into the lives of our children, of our friends, of strangers who need us now more than ever. We can fill the hours with so much labor in that center circle that we simply don’t have time or energy to fret over what isn’t ours to decide anyway.

All it takes is intention, and a plan. Commit to refocus on what you can control. Turn off the TV. Spend less time on the internet. Calendar more time with your children. You can control how much you worry over what you can’t control. And the first step is committing to do it.

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Your quarantine survival kit

Maybe your children are happily ignorant of what’s going on, or maybe they’re worried, and looking to you for assurance. Many of them are home all day now, their schools shuttered into the foreseeable future. It’s a stressful time. Whenever I hear people are being told to shelter in place, I think: I’m a father. I am the shelter.

But what if I’m not enough?

My struggle in crisis is that I worry for my children (their health, their economic future, whether I’ll even be able to provide for them in a year) to the point that I get short-tempered. I grow impatient with their recklessness, intolerant of their foolishness, fed up with their sloppiness. In an ironic twist, my care for them gets transmogrified into unkindness.

Perhaps you face the same struggle.

Photo credit: Markus Spiske

Well, one thing I’ve learned about coping with uncertainty is that we can reduce our stress by creating domains of certainty. We can turn our attention from the things we can’t control to the opportunities all around us to fix, to heal, to teach.

But without a plan, that’s just a nice sentiment. If you’ve been looking through the resources here, and if you get my daily emails, you’ve probably discerned that I’m a big fan of the calendar. If your home life is getting turned upside-down like that of many families, you can inject some immediate certainty by helping your children put together a simple task list for the day. Ask them to come up with some ideas to exercise their minds and bodies, and to have some fun.

While you’re at it, write down some things in your own calendar that you’re going to do with them. Don’t let day after day slip by, especially now, when so many people need the simple reassurance of human contact.

And if you’re wondering what to put on your calendar, below are some resources chock-full of ideas. Whether you make a backyard mortar or find a comfy book to read together, don’t miss the opportunities in this upended world to be the shelter your children need far more than bricks and mortar.

Quarantine survival supplies

Art of Manliness DIY projects: Everything from potato cannons to paper fighter jets.

Arts and Crafts projects: 50 projects that are less dangerous than a potato cannon, but still kind of fun.

Backyard games: Cardboard forts, giant dominoes–there’s something here for everyone.

Exploratorium: Tons of science projects for kids of all ages.

Khan Academy: These people have revolutionized math, science, computer programming, even art history. Sign your kids up and watch them love to learn.

OpenLibrary: With libraries closing across the country, here’s a free resource filled with online books for all ages.

Kanopy: Movies and documentaries available with a library membership, including a host of instructional videos.

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Guard the door

Fear is a thief. I say this as a father whose pockets have been picked many times. I’ve had countless moments of peace snatched from my hands. Hours of sleep pilfered. Excellence replaced with adequacy, because my mind was elsewhere.

Where, exactly? On what could go wrong. An illness, a car accident, a vicious dog on a frayed leash. I am a walking encyclopedia of worst-case scenarios. Go ahead, name something children do every day, and I can tell you a dozen ways they could get hurt, crippled, killed. Where someone else might see a toddler riding his tricycle down the driveway, I see a careless UPS driver behind the wheel of a two-ton truck. A walk on the nature trail? Poisonous snakes. Family cookout? Exploding propane tank.

I was this way before my daughter died from a brain tumor, but that nightmare certainly made it worse. Enduring horror makes you realize the worst things don’t always happen to other people. They happen to you.

But fear, like I said, is a thief. When I invite it to lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear while I’m working or praying or playing with my children, I invite it to confiscate the small joys that are our only solace in a world of hardship. How foolish, how cruel, to let what has not come to pass steal all that remains untarnished by what did come to pass.

I share this with you because this is a fearful time for many of us. Fear of the coronavirus, of a sagging economy, of what our fellow humans are capable of when they too are afraid. If you need a few dozen other looming troubles to tremble over, I’m the man to see. But right now I’m the man reminding you that there’s good all around you. That the darkness will always and ever have no choice but to retreat in the face of even a little light. That it only wins when we clamp shut our eyes.

So today, and tomorrow, and maybe even the day after that, spend a little time noticing the good. Gratitude has always been the undoing of fear. This world is full of suffering, yes, but it is also filled with goodness. See that. Be a part of that. Don’t let the thief in.

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The ripple effect

My son is staying home from school today because he’s afraid he might get shot. Rumors are swirling about a group of kids talking, possibly even planning to bring guns to school. We’re told the authorities are involved. Who knows what’s real? My son says one of the supposed plotters doesn’t like him. He’s afraid he’ll be looking down the barrel of a shotgun or pistol or whatever else children can nowadays get their hands on regardless of their mental state.

I don’t know anything about that kid, and I doubt most of the rumors are true. But I know, you know, our children know: This is our world now. The world we’ve made for our children.

I say We because of the ripples we all of us create during our lifetimes. I’m thinking of the old neighbor who always welcomed me into his workshop while he tinkered, to ask all the questions I wanted. Of a woman on my street with a house full of books and no TV that I ever saw, who used to welcome me in, give me cookies, let me sit dropping crumbs all over her nice chairs, and talk with me. I have no recollection what either of these adults ever talked with me about. I only know that to this day I love to be in workshops and rooms full of books.

Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons

And I think as well about the people I’ve either wronged or been kind to, and how they went on to wrong or be kind to others, perhaps the momentary decision turning on how I treated them. And so on, and so on. Yes, this is the world we’ve made. Are making.

There’s a wonderful essay by the reporter portrayed in last year’s movie about Mister Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In it he ponders what Fred Rogers would have thought about school shooters:

“The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something ‘really big,’ and he asked, ‘Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, “I’m going to do something really little tomorrow”?'”

He went on to devote a week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to talking with children about how being little doesn’t mean unimportant. How they can do big things by first doing little things. He gave them hope that their lives matter, that everyone’s life can be a good one.

Which I suppose is true for any of us. It’s why we focus here on building up small fathering habits. Because of the ripples all around us. C.S. Lewis once wrote that everyone we meet is either an immortal horror or an everlasting splendor. And if you believe in ripples you understand that, intentionally or not, you play a part in which of these a person becomes.