re·as·sur·ance
ˌrēəˈSHo͝orəns/
noun
A relative is dying, and my son was in tears. I lay down with him and held him as he cried. His spirit is most like mine and so I know too well what he was feeling. I desperately wanted to reassure him about her passage, about life in general. I started talking, not even sure what was going to come out.
I said something like, this is one of the hardest parts of life and there is no way around it. I told him it's all going to be okay. I told him that her body is sick but her spirit will remain and be omnipresent. I said something to the effect of, our spirits are so much bigger than the bodies that contain them, that in many ways our bodies both enable and confine our sentience. She will be free, I said, to love us all more freely.
My words seemed to reassure him. Because of my own existential struggles with loneliness, I have always wanted desperately for my children to feel that I am always right there, if not in person, in love. I compare it to a hug, whether I am alive or not, I will always surround them. Love in general will always surround them. They cannot fall. I want them to have an existential reassurance that I have never felt fully myself, a feeling/confidence that I have craved deeply and have seen in others but never felt. That there was a place to cave into in the times I needed it.
“Stories are masks of God.
That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
ˌrēəˈSHo͝orəns/
noun
- the action of removing someone's doubts or fears.
"children need reassurance and praise" - a statement or comment that removes someone's doubts or fears.
plural noun: reassurances
"we have been given reassurances that the water is safe to drink
A relative is dying, and my son was in tears. I lay down with him and held him as he cried. His spirit is most like mine and so I know too well what he was feeling. I desperately wanted to reassure him about her passage, about life in general. I started talking, not even sure what was going to come out.
I said something like, this is one of the hardest parts of life and there is no way around it. I told him it's all going to be okay. I told him that her body is sick but her spirit will remain and be omnipresent. I said something to the effect of, our spirits are so much bigger than the bodies that contain them, that in many ways our bodies both enable and confine our sentience. She will be free, I said, to love us all more freely.
My words seemed to reassure him. Because of my own existential struggles with loneliness, I have always wanted desperately for my children to feel that I am always right there, if not in person, in love. I compare it to a hug, whether I am alive or not, I will always surround them. Love in general will always surround them. They cannot fall. I want them to have an existential reassurance that I have never felt fully myself, a feeling/confidence that I have craved deeply and have seen in others but never felt. That there was a place to cave into in the times I needed it.
“Stories are masks of God.
That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
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