Opinion
September 28, 2023 — 5.00am
My daughter once said to me, “Not everything is a learning opportunity, Mum.” I think she was about nine, and I was trying to turn something innocuous, like missing a train or burning the chops, into some kind of life lesson. I don’t remember the exact details, except that it was her first recorded eye-roll, so I couldn’t help but be proud. We come from a long line of excellent eye-rollers, and she’s since shown herself to be quite gifted.
The point is though, I do believe there are teachings in pretty much every experience, but what I sometimes forget is that the student is often me. Case in point, when recently we joined the whole of the known universe in an online queue for Taylor Swift tickets.
Jo Stanley and daughter Willow.
The 14-year-old had been swept up in Swiftie hysteria – or Swif-teria, if you will – and simply couldn’t survive, Mum, if she didn’t see the concert. While I have zero interest in Tay Tay, I do love making memories for my daughter and music is a great joy that we share. So, because it required a tech set-up to rival NASA, I took my place next to Willow, her on her laptop, me on mine, to wait and wait. And wait. Aaaaand wait.
We spent hours watching a countdown that reset every 12 seconds, desperately hoping the algorithm would pluck us from the queue, so we could buy the golden tickets. As if I didn’t have anything else to do (cue eye-roll).
I’m a typical sandwich-years woman. Between paid work, unpaid work, activities and appointments and combined with the mental load of having to remember everything for everyone, I feel as if I’m only one tiny misstep away from flying off the back of this treadmill.
So even as I multitasked with emails and a Zoom call or two, pressing pause on my usual schedule was a stressful inconvenience. But, two hours in, having huffed and puffed and whinged about how outrageous this robbing of my day was, I realised (incoming life lesson) this sitting with my daughter, tickets or not, was the activity.
Having huffed and puffed and whinged about how outrageous this robbing of my day was, I realised this sitting with my daughter was the activity.
Jo Stanley
We chatted, we sang, we watched old phone videos and laughed at past versions of us. I told her how we used to buy our concert tickets from a counter at Myer, or just try our luck on the phone. How I’d bought tickets to U2 on the school payphone during recess, to which she said, “Who’s U2?” And how we’d meet our friends at the concert, in our terrible blue mascara and orange foundation because there were no YouTube make-up tutorials to watch, and – get this – we’d have to just trust that they’d turn up, because we had no way of checking where they were.
Perhaps because she had nowhere else to be, she listened to my old-timey reminisce, zero eye-roll. And then she shared the books she’s loving and TV she’s hated, the friendships she’s making and the opinions she’s forming, so that I casually learnt in precious snippets (keeping it very cool so as not to scare her off) the parts of herself that she’s discovering. All because I stopped and surrendered to that moment in time.
It was truly an unexpected gift – which I got to receive twice because we missed out on the first round and went back for more torture when the next concert was released. But lucky me, because the learning opportunity stayed with me.
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They say time is our greatest enemy and I feel this keenly. To the point where, paradoxically, I ruin so much of the time I have worrying about it. About how quickly it passes (how is it October already?) and how little I’ve done with it (honestly, there’s a bag of op-shop clothes in my boot that has been there since February).
And now that I’m over 50, there’s the creeping sense of running out of time. The silly thing about that being, of course, that all the things that could extend our actual time on this planet – good sleep, exercise, nature, nutrition, connection with loved ones – we so often don’t make time for.
But in the end that algorithm, as frustrating as it was, was the perfect teacher. A reminder that we can only patiently wait for time to unfold, and to sit in the present moment with curiosity and gratitude. And that whatever happens, we can only meet the outcome with acceptance.
In this instance the outcome was not getting Taylor Swift tickets – a disappointment the teenager did, remarkably, survive. I told her that if U2 tour Australia, we can go to that instead. I’ve only just recovered from the eye-roll.
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