Find your composure

I read this in today’s Ask Amy column (yes it’s true, I spend a portion of my day reading advice columns online) and thought it was worth sharing:

Dear Amy: It has been interesting to read how different people handle toddler meltdowns. My father’s method seemed to be effective.

Whenever my brother or I would have a meltdown, we would go off on an extensive search for our “composure.” We would look everywhere — under the couch (“No, I don’t see your composure here), behind the door (“Still not here), until we finally calmed down.

I don’t remember ever officially finding my composure, and it took me until I was about 6 to realize that “composure” is not a concrete object!

This spoke to me as a parent who has dealt with many, many meltdowns and who still struggles with how to handle them. And it strikes me that it’s a useful approach to handle our own adult freak outs as well.

When we’re stuck in traffic and afraid of being late for a meeting, or when our checking account is low and we’re afraid of not having enough money, or when any number of stressful things happen in a day, we may tend to spiral the situation out of control in our heads. We may create worst-case scenarios of horrible, terrible things that will happen, and start to have our adult version of a meltdown. For example, I tend to panic while driving if I run up against any traffic, and if it goes on for too long, pound the steering wheel, yell, and fret about all this time that is being wasted.

I wonder if our inner grown-up selves could, with grace and compassion, help our inner freaking-out selves find their composure in these situations. Maybe allowing the time to breathe, be present and find our composure would let us approach life with a more centered, grounded perspective.

Where our composure ends up might surprise us.