Becoming your potential

I had a picnic in a cemetery earlier this week.

Now, for some of you that sounds like a perfectly normal event.  For others – well, you are probably wondering if I’ve lost the plot.

You see, I come from the Orthodox Christian faith and our tradition is that on the first Sunday after Easter, we hold a memorial service for our departed and we go to the cemetery to bless their graves and share a meal.  It’s quite a lively event.  For us, it’s an annual social gathering (with the living!).

I think it’s a really nice tradition.  We get to visit the relatives, share old stories and simply take some time to remember our lives with the ones who are no longer with us in the physical world.   

I grew up attending these celebrations from the time when I was a baby.  I also attended funerals with my parents as I grew up.  Visits to the cemetery were just part of normal, everyday life.  

I’ve never thought of death as weird, or of cemeteries as morbid places, so I couldn’t quite understand why other people (not of similar religious traditions to my own) seemed to fear cemeteries.

Over the years I’ve heard parents wanting to ‘protect’ their children and not take them to someone’s burial – even if that someone was a close relative.

Look, I get it.  I understand that parents want their children to have time to ‘just be kids’ and not have to deal with what we consider to be ‘adult’ subjects.  Death can be a confronting topic for some and the choice of what to expose children to is clearly the responsibility of their parents and it’s certainly not for me to place my values, beliefs and traditions onto someone else.  However, these different approaches to dealing with death got me thinking about how we all tend to want to protect the people we love from difficulties or pain. 

And you’d think that’s a good thing, right?

Well, maybe yes and maybe no.

We, as human beings, are made to grow and expand into our greatest potential. And it’s through facing challenges that we build our strength and resilience.   

But think about it… Although it’s a natural, human trait to protect those we love, do we do them an injustice if we don’t allow them to work through challenges?  Do we keep people from stepping into their true potential when we stifle their growth by limiting what they are exposed to? 

I wonder, when we look to protect someone from a challenge, if we are judging their ability to deal with that challenge through the eyes of our own limitations, rather than through the eyes of their potential.

I think this quote by Abraham Maslow sums up this week’s blog perfectly… 

“Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of over-protection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.”

Just like a caterpillar that needs to spend time in its cocoon to transform and then struggle to break free in order to become a butterfly, we as human beings may need to spend time in darkness and struggle in order to develop our strength, build our resilience, break free and become the person we were created to be.