The game escalated real quick.
I was in the backyard gardening and weeding. Suddenly, Myles was zooming around as Gecko and deputized me as Catboy, which are both characters in PJ Masks, one of his favorite television shows.
Within minutes, we were both zooming around, in character, from end to end across the backyard. Myles quickly made the Fisher Price table the Gecko-mobile and Robyn's minivan our headquarters. For nearly 20 minutes, Myles, with a full-toothed smile, would proclaim, “to the Gecko-mobile!”, giggling every time.
About 10 minutes into the game, I realized Myles wasn’t pretending. The table was actually the Gecko-mobile and Robyn’s whip was actually our Headquarters. The world inside his head had become real. Myles had fully expressed his inner world and made it his and my outer world.
—
When disappointed, Myles lets out a sound that we call "the shriek," which resembles the yelp of a pterodactyl.
Recently, this happened when we were scrambling to get to Tortola for a family vacation that was two years in the making. The airline canceled our 6:00 AM flight at 6:00 PM the night before. So we rushed, mobilizing within 90 minutes, to rent a car so we could go to Cleveland to make a flight the next morning. But after waiting in line at Avis for an hour, we discovered that the airline only rebooked half our party. At 11pm, after hours of scrambling, we told the kids we may not be going to the beach.
The news took a minute to sink in. And then, as we started to all head back to the airport parking lot, we heard it - the shriek reverberated and echoed off the surrounding concrete. Honestly, all eleven of us wanted to shriek a little.
The shriek moment was the inverse of our afternoon playing PJ Masks in the backyard. This time, Myles internalized the realities of the outer world and his inner world transformed because of it.
—
We all face this predicament. Our inner and outer worlds are constantly in tension.. Sometimes, we want to take our inner world and impose it on our outer world - this is what we call expression.
Other times, we take the realities of the outer world and allow them to shape our inner world - this is what we call empathy.
Our day-to-day lives are a constant negotiation to bring our inner and outer worlds into balance. It’s a dance between the two worlds we all occupy.
Failing to dance and balance our inner and outer worlds has dire consequences.
If we express too much of our inner world onto the outer world, it oppresses those around us. If we don’t express enough of our inner world, we end up subduing and subjugating our own souls.
Excessive empathy and external influences can overwhelm and crush us. But if we empathize too little, we must sacrifice intimacy and human connection.
We have a choice. We can either snap from the tension between our inner and outer worlds, or we can learn to dance the dance which brings our worlds into balance.
I suppose there’s a third choice, but I think it’s the worst option of the three: suppress and numb. When the tension between our two worlds gets too strong, we can just rub some dirt on it. We can distract ourselves with substances or thrilling pleasures. We can pretend our troubles don’t exist.
Maybe suppressing and numbing is okay for a time. I do believe that nothing in the world can take the place of persistence and that sometimes we need to keep calm and carry on. But I have never met a sane person who can live like that indefinitely. Eventually we all snap - it’s just a matter of when.
In retrospect, this is exactly what happened in my early twenties: I suppressed, then numbed, and then eventually I snapped. Only after that snap did I learn to dance.
This is one of our greatest responsibilities we have as parents. Our children need us to help them learn to dance. Otherwise, the only way they will deal with the tension between their inner and outer worlds will be to suppress and numb, or snap. Luckily, as millennial parents, we have the data and research to know and do better.
I aspire to do better for my three sons, so they can navigate the balance between self-expression and empathy, without having to suppress, numb, and eventually snap. Instead, I must help them learn to dance.
If you enjoyed this post, check out my new book which is in pre-sale now. There's also a free PDF version. For more details, visit https://www.neiltambe.com/CharacterByChoice and be sure to let me know what you think after you read it.