When you look at this picture, what do you see?
A terrifying spider?
Or a beautiful work of natural art?
When it comes to spiders, I don't necessarily like them, but as long as they aren't in my house or crawling on me, I think it's just fine that they coexist with us.
I know the benefits they bring and god love them for eating the mosquitoes!
This particular spider was suspended from the doorframe of an outside entryway at my office building.
It was minding its own business, spinning its spectacular web in the morning sunshine.
When I saw it, I was actually struck by its beauty.
I paused for a minute to take a picture and just pay respect to its uniqueness.
If I had seen it in my office or crawling in my cubicle, I would have likely screamed like a little girl while I tried to find something that I could use to squash it with.
For most of us, whether we see beauty or we experience fear in a given situation depends on our perspective and our lens on life.
Especially in times of crisis, when events are triggering deep-seated fears and emotions that we may not even realize are hiding within us.
The good news is that the more challenges and crises we face, the more experiences we have to fall back on.
And with that backlog of experiences comes more stories of recovery and hope, more tools and techniques we can use to power through, and more perspective that helps us believe that this too shall pass.
We need to experience difficult things in life to build that perspective.
And so do our kids.
This crisis is especially hard on our young people, because they've barely lived enough life to have the mental and emotional tools to power through something like this.
As hard as it is sometimes, we need to let them feel pain and hardship, to experience the consequences of their actions, to be taken to task to fix or pay for things they break, to make amends to others that they've wronged.
It's only in those ways that they will learn resilience and perspective.
And for those of us who've been through so much in life already, we need to be sure that we are leveraging the perspective we have.
We need to be role models for our kids (and in some cases other adults around us).
We need to keep our wits about us and talk openly to them about the bad things that have come before this and how we made it through them.
I'm so grateful that I'm in my 40's experiencing this crisis and not in my teens.
I'm grateful for the sh*t I've dealt with in my life and the strength it has given me that helps keep me sane right now.
I have my days when this is all just too much, but because I can fall back on those past experiences, I can pull myself up out of it and carry on.
Today is Mother's Day. My boys are still asleep and I'm up enjoying a cup of coffee and my blog.
I'm proud of who I've become and of my boys and how they are gaining experiences to store up in their toolkits for the future.
None of us in this family are perfect, that's for sure.
But the best I can hope for this Mother's Day is that my boys are learning from me how to handle themselves in a crisis.
That I'm teaching them a lesson in how to maintain perspective.
And that I'm giving them the opportunity to go through this experience in their own way and build their own perspective too.
Someday, when they are off on their own and a crisis comes along, I hope they can look at it and see a beautiful work of natural art and not a terrifying spider.
That's the best Mother's Day gift they could ever give me.
Here's to maintaining perspective and making the most of today.
Enjoy!
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