Wishing you: Good Days full of Hope and Happiness
Residential Child Care is a creative activity.
Residential Child Care workers take any part of a child’s world and experiment with kindness with it to make the world a better place.
Hurrah, a new book by Michael Rosen:
Good Days: An A-Z of Hope and Happiness by Michael Rosen, published by Ebury on 4 September.
As Parliament returns (more from NCERCC this week) Residential Child Care faces things, as Rosen sees more generally, “some of us thought could and should have been solved haven’t been solved. Things that some of us thought would show signs of progress haven’t progressed”.
He makes a claim; we can’t do anything about the things that bring us down if we are oppressed and depressed by them. We have to have hope. We need to be hopeful creatures in order to live. No matter how much events seem to point towards despair… we have to find strategies and techniques to be hopeful.
He says we have to find reasons to go on, “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”
Change happens in the everyday. And it isn’t so rare In fact it’s happening all the time You must have heard someone say, ‘For things to stay the same; they must change.’
He gives some ways to be hopeful of having good days and looks to us to adopt them, adapt them or, better still, come up with your own.
‘What if’ are key words in experimenting. Following those 2 words something is going to change.
He adds sultanas to belgian ice cream. He was prepared for “an interesting clash of texture: the freezing-melting of the ice-cream with the chewiness of the sultana. But something else happened. The ice-cream has frozen the sultanas. They have turned into resistant toffee-like pebbles. So as the chocolate melts, the sultana, in this frozen state, persists and can only give up its flavour if I give it a good old chew. What’s happened is that the whole business of this 10 o’clock snack has slowed down. It’s become impossible to consume Belgian chocolate ice-cream laced with sultanas quickly. It can’t be rushed. It has to be taken step by step. With pauses. While the flavours and textures blend.”
He provides a reflection on life needing to recuperate, repair and regenerate. Recently lots of RCC workers we’ve met have wanted to talk about needing a good sleep. One slept her entire day off, a new definition to ‘off’. Sleep is now a module in the NCERCC RCC Academy curriculum.
Michael shares his tricks for getting to sleep like concentrating on one good thing that happened to you, or that you did on that day. It can be tiny or seemingly insignificant. RCC work often looks like nothing but as the books by Naomi Stadlen about mothering show there is everything going on.
He also explains sleep making through counting, concentrating on each number in a detached, calm and contented way, thinking of the shape of the number itself. The moment that your mind flicks on to one of the anxieties, back you go to one, gently, nonchalantly, calmly.
Happy experimenting.
