Calm Is Glam.

Robin Sharma said that peace is the new luxury. I agree with him. There is so much happening in and around us that our peace often pays the ultimate price. A lot of life has been commercialized. We often think money can buy peace. Well in a sense I think it can because when your bills are covered then you tend to be less anxious. I won’t downplay the importance of cash. It gives us options and that makes life generally easier. A buddy of mine once commented that people who say money isn’t everything usually don’t have money. That they console themselves with such mindsets. The other lot that agrees money isn’t everything is the loaded one. They are speaking from experience because they’ve experienced affluence. Anyway, this is not a money conversation folks but I wish you mob cash as you go through life. As long as we don’t see the worst of you as a result.

The other day my son said he gets restless every time it approaches 10 pm and I’m not home. He fears that I’ll be caught up in curfew and go to jail. This life has become anything but calm even to our small people. I also realised that we are having more adult chats with him and his siblings. Many of our friends and families have lost loved ones and we talk about it frequently with my baby sharks. I still have an internal resistance to talking about death to them but if I don’t they will inquire elsewhere. We have no choice as parents but to guide our small people through this crazy world even as we figure it out ourselves.

Such conversations have resulted in a lot of prayers for healing and comfort when retiring to bed in the evening. How do we help our kids live and see life realistically without them getting scared and overwhelmed? Any suggestions?  Meanwhile, we do the best we can sir God being our helper.

I think practising calmness as we do life is a skill that will do us a lot of good. I’m an extrovert and easily get anxious. It shows in my fast speaking. I don’t like it. The times I have talked or responded calmly to a situation, I ended up with better results hence feeling good about myself. I admire calm people. They seem decisive, confident and self-aware. When they speak their words are few and carry more weight so they tend to be more believable. They can appear boring sometimes though but their calmness seems to serve them well.

That’s a skill I’ve been trying to cultivate. Speaking slower and less. My late dad had a sign at his office door many years ago that read, “ the more you talk the more you are likely to sin”. I believe calmness is one vaccine for the anxiety produced by the corona pandemic. Max Lucado tells us,” the presence of anxiety is unavoidable but the prison of anxiety is optional.” The point here is for us to accept anxiety will be part of life but we need to avoid being caged by it.

I wish I’d say here that it’s easy to live a calmful life. We know so much of what we should do to remain calm in the storm around us. But knowing it is one thing, living it out is the difficult part. No wonder the greatest distance to cover is the twelve inches between our heart and mind. There’s no shortcut to covering those twelve inches folks. Believing what we know takes a lot of effort. We have to find learning and coping mechanisms to move us slowly towards calm. And we have to carry our significant others with us because calmness tends to do better in a positive environment.

My older baby shark is a pre-teen so she’s all about being trendy and fashionable. She’s a glamourous young lady. I’m her dad, of course, I have nothing but praise and admiration for her he he. Glam is short for glamourous. It can be defined as full of glamour or excitingly attractive. Now those are words my baby shark would love to be associated it. So I hope to sneak in calmness hapo ndani in the hope that she can start internalizing it as a way to handle the disruption that life (and teenagehood) has become. Robin Sharma said peace is the new luxury. Lucas said calm is the new cool ha…

When our anxieties get the better of us calm leaves the door and we miss a lot. The calmer we are the better we get and the more we see. Be calm folks. It’s trendy.