Lost, found and lost again

Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.

Dale Carnegie


Some scientists have been arguing for years about the status of the ivory billed woodpecker. Long thought to be extinct, there was some excitement in the birding community when a few sightings and a video tape surfaced that showed the bird alive and well in an Arkansas swamp. Sadly, the most trusted bird guy in all of the land says that the videotape and sightings are mistaken and the bird actually has been extinct for some time,
This semi-controversy is interesting to me from several points of view. First, it proves yet again that some people will believe anything as long as they want to believe it. Weapons of mass destruction? Sure. Bigfoot? sure. Nellie living in loch ness? of course. Alien abductions? absolutely, my wife's cousins best friend was abducted just last week.
Sometimes when we are shown irrefutable proof that something does or does not exist we can't see it because our mind blinds us to the truth. We have been raised to believe certain things about ourselves, about our world and as we grow older we never take the time to challenge these self imposed, learned limitations. Our minds chain us to these past beliefs, to the time we tried something and we failed. We learn to never try to do that again. If we try it again we will only fail again. Our minds can become a more restrictive, suffocating place than any penitentiary.
When I was younger I was told that I couldn't do certain things. Some of it came from my teachers, some of it came from my parents, some of it came from my friends. It's not important who put the thoughts out there, it is important what my mind did with them once they got inside. I never really developed the skills or courage to challenge my self doubts. I think I am a lot better at challenging myself now than I used to be. My wife helped me learn this skill, although she most likely doesn't know it.
I don't want my daughter to develop the self doubts that afflict everyone. I would prefer she live a life of happiness, bliss and never experience any sadness. This, of course, is not reality. She will have sadness, depression and unhappy moments just like I do, her mom does and you do.
As parents we need to enable her to deal with these issues in life. She needs to be taught to challenge her self doubts, challenge her inner critic when it says things that make her sad. If she learns from a teacher that she isn't such a great singer, she needs to be strong enough to challenge that belief the next year, with the next teacher. I hope we can show her not to wait too long to challenge her negative thoughts. The longer they stick around, the harder they are to question and eradicate. If they stay around long enough we meld them into our psyche, they become part of how we identify ourselves to the world.
Part of being a parent is to have some sort of a guideline of what you want to impart onto your kids. You need to have some sort of a plan, it can't be a willy nilly kind of thing or you are likely to leave out some important things. I just want to make sure that I try to teach her all that I possibly can so she can be the best person she can possibly be.