My ten year old is an amazing and resilient spirit. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know him, but he’s not your typical kid and we all know a kid or two like him, I’m sure. He has some learning issues that are new to us over the course of the last year. Actually, since he was five we’ve known something unusual was going on but he’s always maintained himself well in school, for the most part. He is incredibly devoted to some things and drawing is one of those. He has taught himself to draw incredibly well by spending hours and hours practicing and teaching himself new techniques. He is fantastic at karate and he swims on the swim team. However, on top of that, he dresses unusually, expresses himself in very funny but kind of acutely embarrassing ways, and generally is a free spirit. He is not interested in being anything other than what he feels, which is great, but difficult for a ten year old and his mother! He is incredibly empathetic, loves conversations with adults and other kids and is kind and caring towards others, big and small.

I find that as his parent, sometimes things come out of my mouth that make me sound and feel less than supportive. I tend to draw attention to things he could change or do that might make him ‘fit in’ more. Not because I think it’s the only way – I rationally completely understand that there are many ways to get to where you are going – but sometimes my instinct to protect him from ridicule or criticism is fierce and immediate and I find myself saying things to him that would make him less than whole if he took my advice. And, to his credit, he doesn’t take my advice for the most part…

Tonight I watched him drawing and thinking and working hard on something important to him. A project that ties him to friends, girls and boys, older and younger than he, independent of adult input, creative, lovely and really, really in depth and I saw him searching for the right pen, the right pencil, the right tool and I couldn’t believe how resilient he is in the face of my doubt!!! Wow, that was a wake up of magnificent proportions!

Here is to all the kids and adults in the world that walk their own path, even when others are doubtful and disparaging about where they are going and how they will get there. I hope my son’s resilience is for a lifetime and that every time I witness it, it gives me strength as his mother to support him to be who he truly is and not who I think he should be. Think what the future holds! All the six Seconds principles apply here but I think especially of ‘No Way is the Way’ and ‘Wisdom Lives Within.’ I hope that even without hearing those words he is experiencing those feelings.

Emma, my daughter, is having “the year of her life” in school — huge leaps of passion and learning and adventure.  And facing powerful challenges.  The most pressing being a relentless conflict with another girl, let’s call her Josie.  They are both strong willed, independent, and believe themselves to be smart.  Patty & I have worked to help Emma see that being right is not that interesting unless you are also kind.   In turn, Emma has worked hard on being less abrasive, but these two just push one another’s buttons — and now it seems like nearly every day Josie is accusing Emma of something.

The latest round was that Josie was mad that Emma ignored her.  “I don’t want to fight with her so I just walk away,” says Emma… and we all agree that’s better than fighting… and that it’s not the same as making peace.  Emma was at a loss, though, of how to engage a different way, and was feeling helpless.  “She’s mad at me no matter what I do.”

So last week I shared a bit of Gandhi’s story.  Emma could definitely relate, and found the concept of Satyagraha fascinating.  Satyagraha is the name Gandhi gave to the type of nonviolent resistance he led to transform India.  Gandhi wrote:

Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence.

He contrasted satyagraha to passive resistance — or to walking way (in Emma’s case).  Satyagraha is active, it’s a force, but it’s not the kind of force most of us in the West think of when we think “power.”  Yet it turns out to be a game-changing, world-changing power because it steps out of the paradigm of escalating might and righteousness.

And it’s not just “what you do” that matters.  “How” is just as important.  For Gandhi, the means is the result — if you pursue peace through violence, you have made violence.  If you create peace through love, then you have created love.

Emma came back the next day having tried it.  “Satyagraha is SO difficult,” she said, “but I am going to keep doing it.”  While she struggled with it, she also knew, she experienced in just one day, that this is a transformational way of engaging with disagreement.  We could see in her reflection that she had, in fact, found a new kind of force.

As Gandhi said, when you let go of “violence of the heart” it generates a powerful new energy:

What I have pleaded for is renunciation of violence of the heart — and consequent active exercise of the force generated by the great renunciation.

The challenge is maintaining it — holding onto the kindness in the midst of the daily frustration.  Because while Emma can choose her response, Josie is continuing to look for opportunities to blame.  And how do you, as a 9-year-old, not take this personally?  It’s so difficult to step back and recognize that Josie’s reactivity is Josie’s.

In our EQ training we sometimes talk about the idea of “making others good.”  This means letting go of being right over others — it means accepting that “they are doing their best and I could do no better.”  The challenge is finding a genuine, solid core of caring for this “enemy” (who our egos are saying is “wrong/bad/mean”) and  letting go of the defense of righteousness.

Satyagraha is a process of resistence and a force of power, and an exercise in justice; at the core it is change that starts with love.

Yesterday the BBC published their commissioned report  Changing UK which says that analysing the census data going back 30 years reveals the people in the UK are now much less rooted in their local neighbourhood. London was revealed as the ‘most lonely in UK’

A wonderful art installation wishing for peace on the Korean peninsular, at Imjingak, near the demilitarised zone which separates the two Koreas in Paju, about 55km north of Seoul, on Friday.

This awareness campaign for the International Red Cross won bronze at the ACT competition last year. The idea behind the artwork is that everybody have the right to be treated as a normal human being. A healthy life is very important, compassion and tolerance is part of it.

“Every conflict around the globe, whether it’s between countries or cousins, begins when people disregard this (compassion) basic human emotion. Compassion helps us find common ground and overlook our differences by discovering that we all have the same colour blood in our hearts.”

Direct from very hard hitting osocio

Daniel Goleman spoke at TED earlier this year and his talk entitled “Why are we all good Samaritans” is now on their site and you can watch it here.