1: Barbara Fredrickson‘s firstborn son was not a good sleeper.
“He needed to be in our arms while he drifted off,” she writes in her book Love 2.0. “He also needed a particular motion, one that we couldn’t achieve in the comfort of a rocking chair, but only by walking.”
For thirty minutes or more each night, Barbara or her husband would slowly pace around his tiny nursery, holding the baby in their arms.
“He trained us well,” she remembers. “We learned that we could only place him in his crib after he’d succumbed to a deep sleep. Anything less would lead to another long bout of pacing.”
It was a stressful time for the new parents as they juggled all their new responsibilities, including their own sleep deprivation.
We “began to dread the time-sink of this bedtime ritual,” she writes. “We’d yearn to be released from the shadowy nursery so that we could tackle the mounting dishes and laundry, make headway on a few more work projects by email, or collapse into our own bed.”
Then, one night, her husband had an epiphany.
“He gave up thinking about where else he could be and immersed himself in this parenting experience,” she recalls. “He tuned in to our son’s heartbeat and breath. He appreciated his warmth, his weight in his arms, and the sweet smell of his skin.
“By doing so, he transformed a parental chore into a string of loving moments.
“When my husband shared his secret with me, we each not only enjoyed this bedtime ritual all the more, but our son also fell more swiftly into his deep sleep.”
The nighttime ritual remained the same. What had changed was their perspective. Putting their son to sleep each night became an opportunity for connection. And love.
2: Watching the news, it’s easy to believe that people are more afraid, hostile, and greedy than ever.
“As a global society, we’re also feeling more stress, gaining more weight, and being diagnosed with more chronic illnesses year by year,” Barbara writes.
“In the United States, life expectancies have actually declined for kids today, relative to their parents, for the first time in centuries.”
Our early human ancestors were hard-wired to detect danger. It’s the reason we survived as a species.
“That’s how fear, anger, disgust, and other negative emotions evolved over countless generations,” Barbara writes.
But we inherited other traits as well.
“Prominent within our ancestor’s toolkit—among the life-saving and life-giving resources upon which they could time and again draw—were the strong bonds that they’d forged with those with whom their genetic survival was yoked: their mates, kin, and coalition members,” she writes. “It’s their DNA that lives on within our own cells, that forms the wisdom of our bodies.
“Love is a product of human evolution. In this very literal way, we were made for love.”
We didn’t need to learn how to love. “From birth, our bodies knew how to seek out love, to stoke it, and to gain pleasure and sustenance from it,” Barbara notes. Our brief yet recurrent blasts of positivity resonance with others accrued to build the very bonds that have kept us alive to this day. . .
“Resting in this wisdom we can see past even abundant bickering, nastiness, greed, and fear.”
And yet, we must be aware of and pursue these potential moments of connection and love.
“The problem is that all too often,” she observes, “we simply don’t take the time that’s needed to truly connect with others.
“To the contrary, contemporary society, with its fast-changing technology and oppressive workloads, baits us to speed through our day at a pace that’s completely antithetical to connection.”
Not only that, but when we do connect, it is often through email, text, tweets, or other ways of communicating that don’t involve an actual conversation.
“These can’t fulfill our bodies’s craving for connection,” Barbara writes. “Love requires us to be physically and emotionally present. It also requires that we slow down.”
3: Reflecting again on being a parent, Barbara writes: “Our boys are now nine and twelve,” Barbara writes, “and their bedtime rituals have changed accordingly. Yet it strikes me that, living less than a mile from our kids’ school, my husband and I still have the same opportunity for a walking connection with our kids each day.
“Yet in the mad dash to get the kids to school on time each weekday, it’s easy to find any excuse to drive.
“We all know the virtues of walking. It’s good for our bodies, our brains, as well as the environment.
“What often goes unrecognized, however, is the good it does for our relationships. It offers up the time, physical copresence, and shared movements to satisfy our and our kids’ daily carving for connection.”
Opportunities for connection are everywhere around us. Our job is to wake up and seek them out.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Is there a chore or obligation I can reframe as an opportunity to connect with someone?
Action: Seek out three micro-moments of love and connection today.
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