The Blanket

Our richer kids are often over-protected and get aggressively groomed to make it into the top schools. Parents, nannies, and tutors helicopter them around and chaperone them from piano lesson, to baseball coaching, math tutoring, and whatever else looks good on their resumes to be. Yes, their tiger parents mean well to prepare them from pre-school on for their Ivy League university admission, but they forget to factor in that children are no robots. Children crave strolling around with their friends. Children want to hang out with their parents, or simply have time to play and day-dream.


The poor kids have probably more time to hang out with their friends, but they crave to spend time with their overworked parents who have to work over-time these days to make the finances add up. The students from a poorer neighborhood often feel intimidated by their well-to-do student peers as they lack the resources to do well. In contrast to them, they often get little support for academic excellence at home. I wouldn’t be surprised if rich and poor kids suffer equally, yet, in very different ways. Rich or poor, their escapes are often similar, rectangular boxes like TVs, You-Tube Channels, I-Pads and Play-Stations, texts and Instagram chats fire up their neurons, at least temporarily.


I titled this note ‘the blanket’ because that’s how it feels when a foreign energy takes over. For us adults the self-imposed blanked includes alcohol, porn, drugs, sex, food- or shopping addictions, dependent on what makes us tick; our children already have a taste of what it means to be captured by a foreign energy when they escape into their virtual reality space. Suicides and addictions are on the rise. We have simply forgotten how to live, work and play. Meaningless jobs, a less than innocent childhood, cut off from nature, we crave genuine human contact, meaningful work and trusting relationships.


The spiritual community gets excited these days and predicts a global Ascension phase. Be careful what you wish for! Charles Dickens starts ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ with ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, which probably applies to our time as well. More and more of us get a taste of what it feels like to be sucked in, covered by a blanket that feels so secure and satisfying, yet, gets harder and harder to remove as the years go by. The solution is to learn to fall in love with life, people and what we do professionally once again. A spiritual path does that, and starts us on a healing journey that leads us Home eventually.


I wrote this note in the familiar weekend setting with me typing, my wife working on her computer and our boys watching their favorite You-Tube videos. Suddenly I heard my younger child addressing me in German which doesn’t happen often, ‘Papa, the world soccer championship has started, shouldn’t we watch?’, he asked. We ended up seeing France beating Australia this morning. With us cuddling on the couch, listening to ‘goaaaaaaaaaaal’ with Spanish commentary, shouting at the referees and obvious floppers, despairing over missed passes and penalty kicks. Yes, we are still dealing with an electronic rectangle, but our time spent together   is a lot closer to the magnificence of life than all the other distractions. Bring on the ‘worst of times’, with a little skill and staying power we shall turn them into the ‘best of times’.