One day last week, the kids and I were engaged in our usual after-school routine: as they raided the pantry for snacks, I dug through their backpacks, hoping not to find another letter announcing the presence of lice in one of their classrooms.
I’d just breathed a sigh of relief (no letter this time) and was preparing to excavate the remains of my kids’ lunches when the unwelcome sounds of bickering and whining filled the air. I groaned internally.
There are days when I feel remarkably enlightened (or over-caffeinated) and my kids’ spats somehow don’t get under my skin. Today was not one of them. Today, for whatever reason, I just did not want to freakin’ deal with my kids’ innate tendency to create conflict.
Over the din of two little voices shrieking various iterations of, “It’s not fair!” and “Noooo!” a lightbulb suddenly went off in my brain. I remembered recently seeing a friend’s Facebook post about making your own “Calm Down Jar.”
“Girls!!” I practically yelled, trying to cover the frustration in my voice with what I hoped sounded like enthusiasm, “Let’s make a chill out jar!”
They stopped arguing and looked at me, suddenly curious. “Okay,” they agreed.
I grabbed a mason jar and placed it on the floor. Then the girls took turns filling the jar with water, adding glitter and paint, and stirring the contents. When our creation was complete, I gave it a good spin and we all oohed and aahed as the water whirled and twirled like some mythical sea creature. Mission accomplished: their argument forgotten, the girls were entranced.
Looking at the jar made me think of the movie Horton Hears a Who! “What if each speck of glitter in this jar was really a whole other universe, like in the movie?” I asked the girls. For a moment, we sat quietly, imagining tiny, glittering worlds floating through liquid space. Surprisingly, the kids didn’t fight about who got to keep the jar in her room first, agreeing to take turns.
I know that distracting ourselves from the issues at hand isn’t a long-term solution for conflict. There is plenty of work yet to be done in learning to live peaceably together, whether in our own kitchens or around the world. There are big feelings that need to come out, and tough discussions that need to happen.
But sometimes, when emotions are raw and fragile, there is beauty in just stopping for a moment, in pausing to let the quiet surround us, instead of adding to the noise. So every once in a while, I will come back and gaze at our Chill Out Jar, watching as it spins like a centrifuge, illuminating a different world.
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