#4 Not Afraid of Having Kids

I'm not afraid of having kids, I'm afraid of the thought of having kids.

This was the biggest insight of my life, and it's the foundation to why I wanted to create this project in the first place.

It hit me like a ton of bricks and changed me from the inside out in a split second.

I realised from an early age that I didn't have much of an attraction towards having children.

Few people do as a teenager, but most people naturally lean into it over the years.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting kids, and I never saw it as a defect–just a simple matter of fact that it wasn't for me.

It could be, but there was just nothing about it that I found interesting.

Having kids was a little bit more on my mind lately as both me and my long-term partner were in our early 30's.

She really wanted to have them and had always known so.

I guess opposites really do attract.

A Calm Mind

We were touristing in Japan and about to walk around a lake called Lake Kawaguchiko.

It'd take us approximately 6 hours not counting the stops for delicious treats along the way.

The day was beautiful, the sun was shining and we were both excited.

My mind was calm, but overall there was nothing particular about the day itself.

Before we had even walked our first hour, I remember looking out across the lake and suddenly being hit with the biggest insight of my life.

It came from nowhere like a download, and the understanding felt embodied way before it could be intellectualised and expressed.

I just knew, that I in fact wanted kids.

When I tried to put words to the feeling that had made itself a new home in my body, these very words came to mind:

"I'm not afraid of having kids, I'm afraid of the thought of having kids".

I realised that I have no idea what it's like to have kids.

I've never had them!

Also, I've had very little exposure to them across my life, how could I proclaim resistance to something I knew nothing about?

All my fears, resistances and problematic thinking I've had (such as reading studies that show how parents of newborns are the unhappiest people in the world, and the happiness only goes back to baseline once the kids grow up and move out) popped, right before my eyes.

They were thoughts, constructs made of nothing, entertained like a reluctant watcher of a TV show you don't enjoy.

They were not reality.

And out of that newly created space came the realisation that yes, I actually really wanted kids.

In retrospect this is a surprising outcome.

It could have turned out that my fears were all based on nothing but kids still weren't for me.

Or I could have approached it from a more neutral standpoint.

But the aftermath was what it was:

I really wanted kids.

This changed my life in an instant and made me realise what the insightful Sydney Banks said certainly proved true:

"You are only one thought away from happiness, one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in thought."

I found what was on the other side.