[Stay free]
Dear Donagh,
I'm disappointed with my daughter. We were always close, but I notice a few times lately that she seems to be taking me for granted, like babysitting and whenever she’s short of something. She and her husband were often good to us, it’s true, but I still think they shouldn’t be taking us for granted. They should ask and then be thankful for what we do. I often talk about it to my husband. He passes it off, and he said to write to you about it. Monica
Dear Monica,
You’re a grandmother, so you may remember a toy that children used to play with before they went all digital. There was a plastic frame, and within it a lot of plastic pieces, the size of your thumbnail, that could slide along one another, sideways or up-and-down. They filled the entire frame, except for one space. Everything was gridlocked apart from that one empty space. Any of the pieces right beside it could move into that space – which meant that the empty space moved next-door, so to speak. It could move again and again; in fact it could move all over the frame, and as it moved it allowed the pieces on all sides of it to move; it created a zone of freedom as it went, while all else was gridlocked. The challenge was to move all the pieces into positions where they composed a recognisable picture. See how useful – how freeing – ‘nothing’ is! Without that empty space, everything is stuck fast, nothing moves.
What am I talking about? Not ancient toys, really, but human actions. If we lived in a world where everything was tit-for-tat and nothing was gratuitous, it would not be a life. There would be no freedom, no joy, no change, no surprises, nothing new; everything would be gridlocked. In the toy, it was that one empty space that brought everything to life. In the same way, it is when we do something for nothing that we begin to live and to make life liveable for people around us.
People have the highest admiration for creative artists: people who can make something out of nothing, or next-to-nothing. Picasso made the form of a bull’s head by setting up two pieces of an old bicycle he found in the city dump: the saddle, nose downwards, was the head, and the handlebars set above it were the horns. Who would think of that but someone who knew the inner leap of freedom, that empty space in which something new can come to life? But the greatest artists of all, usually taken for granted, are the people who can do good just because it’s good and not for any returns they might get on it. St Paul was very clear. “Remember the words that the Lord Jesus himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive'" (Acts 20:35).
I would suggest, Monica, that you continue to work from that closeness you said you always had with you daughter. That closeness is your best instinct. Over all those years as you reared her you must have overlooked thousands of things you could have zoomed in on, but didn't. Continue like that. Don’t be tempted now to turn it all into a kind of accountancy. This doesn’t make a slave of you: if you can't babysit some time, or you don’t feel up to it, just tell her so. Stay free. Don’t bottle up resentment. Then you will keep your joy for the whole length of your life.
Donagh