Share Your World – 2016: Week 35

I’m so glad to have discovered the Share Your World Challenge. Cee’s questions make me look at things in a different, maybe special way. This week is no different. If you have not discovered her SYWC yet, head over and check it out and jump in if you feel like it 😉

List 2 things you have to be happy about?
Is there a thing that you “have” to be happy about? I think the moment you have to force yourself into something it’s no longer related to your heart. And when it’s not related to your heart it’s hard to be happy about…

I guess if you look at your life and consider what you have and what would make a huge change in the way you live your life than you have to be happy about some things. Like you “have” to be happy to be healthy, about having a roof over your head, food on your table. Right? But then shouldn’t that just be normal? I mean being happy about it, being grateful for being healthy, having a roof over your head and food on the table?

Being truly happy is a feeling coming from the bottom of your heart. It’s something that makes you smile. There is no way you can force yourself into feeling happy, so I think. But of course there are moments in which you have to make yourself aware of the things you have in life, rather than focusing on what you don’t have or what is going wrong. I don’t believe that you force yourself into being happy. You force yourself into looking at things in a different perspective. And that might make you happy again…

 

If you could take a photograph, paint a picture or write a story of any place in the world, what and where would it be?

This is the picture. The place I’d like to be right now. One of my favorite lookouts. The little path down to “my” little bench. To the place I relax, I connect, I breathe. It’s a place far from here. A place I often visit in my mind. A picture of a place that makes me breathe slower and deeper, let me shoulders relax and puts a smile on my face…

 

Should children be seen and not heard?

Children should be seen, heard and taken seriously at all time. I struggle with people who do not take kids seriously. I don’t like the attitude some adults have towards children. The harsh way they treat them. Not listening to what they have to say.

Of course children have to learn a lot. Of course they have to mature, of course they have to grow. Doesn’t mean though, that they have no voice. And this voice has to be considered. I’ve seen many children who are more mature than many adults, children who have the deeper and more important message as people who run the show. Just because they are “only” grown ups in the making, doesn’t give us the right to treat them like a piece of furniture.

The way I approach parenting: See them, listen to them, recognize them as who they are, read between the lines, read the body language. Talk to them, show them, teach them, explain things to them. Take them seriously. In the end we all are our children’s teachers, each and everyone of us has the power to either lift a child up and guide it to it’s fullest potential or create a lack of confidence they will carry with them forever …

 

 

List at least five of your favorite first names.
Oh my… that I can’t do. It changes so often. I’m glad for the names we picked for our children (they have a first and one middle name) and I still love the names (glad I do…). I think they suit them very well. But thinking of what the options would have been I’m glad we did not choose them. In my case my preference for names changes on a regular base so I can’t really give you a favorite without mentioning our kids names and I will not do that.

Bonus question:  What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?
Rather than just repeating myself I will sheepishly direct you to this post here…