I was cooking in the kitchen as I normally do on the weekends when I over heard my son saying to my wife, “fuss over me.”  “Mom, fuss over me.”  Being four years old his mind is pretty straight forward.  I tend to be more of the disciplinarian in the family and my wife is tends to be the nurturer and the one who “fusses” over the kids.  At times we switch roles.  When we do so, we probably freak out our kids.  The important thing is we communicate what’s happening with our discipline so that we can stand united and provide the structure for learning appropriate behavior.

When he said, “Mom, fuss over me,” he was owning his desire.  He felt the desire within and communicated what was important to him.  He made his expectation clear.  As we grow up and learn the ways of social interaction, we hide ourselves in layers of intrigue, deception, and how we are “supposed” to act.  At some level, this training is something we all need to integrate readily into our societies having moved past the grunting stage of communication.  We’ve evolved past the basics of fear and survival needs. For the sake of social grease, our society requires us to layer and mask our intent.  In doing so, we find ourselves dealing with bullies, miscommunication and awkward moments.  In some way once we’ve grown up, moved out, and started to establish our own personality separate from our parents we have to unlearn some of what we learned.

Knowing our intention is critical to applying the unexpected learning opportunities we come across in our life.  When we know our intent, we can use what we learn to not only better ourselves, but advance our purposes.  Each step in doing so brings out the excellence in ourselves.  We can also own our resources of time, psychology, physiology, social assets and use them to become more self-reliant.  In our relationships, when we own our resources, we can then communicate what’s important to us just like my four-year old did with his mom.  If we need more or less sexual interaction with our spouse we can own up to it and communicate it.  If we need more salary from our job, we can own up to our situation and communicate it to our boss or seek other employment.  If we need to take time to simply get off our butts and move around more, we can own up to it and take action.

Unexpected learning allows us to better ourselves and advance our purposes when we know our intent.