Start the revolution by making your family home a rebellious island of sanity and insane possibility.
Create a home that’s your getaway, a place so good, so relaxing, so full of life that you have no desire to fly off to another distant promised land on a holy-day at an all-inclusive coddling factory.
Tend the fire at your family’s hearth so you have no irresitible need to go on another retreat from your world. Advance instead towards to what you know makes your family life more wholesome.
Help each other and ask for help instead of thumbing through another self-help book in search of solitary solace that leaves you in desperate need for more help.
Play, sing, dance and share stories instead of force-feeding on another saccharine entertainment pill that leaves you oddly deprived.
Reject the spell of monocultures and conformity and weave a vibrant polyculture from your disparate gifts, quirks, desires, passions, dreams.
Slow down, stop, pause and politely but resolutely show the addiction to busyness the door. Instead, lend each other an attentive, sedentary, loving ear.
Build a family altar and kneel down to everything you don’t understand and don’t know and can’t comprehend.
Greet each other every morning with the delight, surprise and gratitude that the sun has risen, and a new day been granted to you all.
Trade the lure of potential for the joy of kinetics–don’t worry, ponder, speculate or strategize about what you or your child might yet become, but act, tinker, experiment so as better to know and celebrate who you are today.
Accept that on an island there’s no place to flee to, no place to hide or withdraw. All islanders need to develop their courage, compassion and vulnerability and stay with what is.
Consider each family member as a living being, not a machine. Refuse to see anyone or anything in the family as a problem in need of a quick solution.
Surrender, yield, receive and atone whenever you have an urge to control, force or dominate your child or your partner.
Be lazy, slothful, phlegmatic and yawn provocatively at efficiency, effectiveness and the cult of getting things done.
Do something just because it thrills you. Make sure it has no intended productive outcome, such as making you stronger, more beautiful, wealthier, healthier, more famous or successful.
Know when enough is enough, use the word ‘thrift’ in at least one conversation every day, and renounce the drooling new-age craving for abundance.
Go against professional mobility and put a stake in the ground to stay put and root yourselves to place, become indigenous.
Single-task as a general rule. Make it a stodgy motto that you post on the toilet seat. “One thing at a time until completion”.
Become a time magician and create more by doing less. You might discover there’s so much time, so little to do. Create a family “to be” list and fill it with all that lifts your hearts.
Climb a tree, swim in the sea, roll down a hill, learn a new nature skill and embrace the wilds as your temple, your playground, your loving mother.
Spread the revolution. Grow your pocket of sanity, your island of possibility, one family at a time. Extend the beauty and health your family creates into a vibrant community, rather than contract or stagnate from a lack of trust or deflated hope.
Understand the law of distraction–what you focus on will distract you from everything else. Like that screen your looking at right now.
Welcome yourselves home every day.