While sitting in Portland’s Japanese Garden, watching Bean excitedly concentrate on the smooth random path of a swimming orange koi, I had a revelation.

My new parenting goal would be to encourage calm, or at least not reflect chaos.

I think I’ve mentioned The Toddler Chaos before. How toddlers flit from one activity to the next, seemingly from one idea to the next, from one need to the next. And for the few seconds that a toddler has decided that she will finally put on her own shoes today, that is entirely where her concentration lies. She becomes one with her shoes, the rest of the world falling around her in a blur. Three seconds later, she may be in commune with a piece of mail that looks interesting. Putting that down, she’s decided that she is desperately thirsty.

Each moment is her entirety. Toddlers don’t multitask.

And the trouble is that each toddler moment looks mostly unimportant to a parent. You have a list of things you need to do, and your toddler pulling mail out of the mail bin is decidedly not important. What’s important right now is putting on our shoes and leaving now.

So, you tell the toddler to cut it out. Or if you’ve had enough, you yank the mail out of her hand and sit her down so you can finally put her shoes on.

If you’re me, you also likely did this from behind her. She momentarily sees your hands sweep in, things are yanked out of her hands, plop she’s on her bottom. She has no idea what just happened.

That’s just one example of how I feel like I’ve been feeding into the toddler chaos. She learns absolutely nothing from this interaction and if anything it creates more of a whirlwind in her little head. I’m going to cut it out.

Toddlers are wired a certain way, and there’s no rational argument you can present them with to make them change. And actually, I’ve long felt that my blind-sided intrusions into her activities not only feeds the whirlwind but increases her obstinacy in performing basic tasks like sitting down to put on her shoes. The more I insist, the more she resists.

Japanese Gardens are carefully crafted to encourage calm and contemplation. Koi swim in lazy circles and your eyes and mind calm as you follow them. Balancing a few zen rocks makes you stop, pause, and focus. Meandering across small bridges, looking at circles raked into sand — all if it creates an environment for calm focus. Maybe the object of your focus is itself pointless; the koi will swim in circles whether you’re looking at them or not, rocks have no need to be carefully stacked. You don’t solve any problems or fix anything, the contemplative work itself is the purpose. You emerge renewed. Your mind is calmed and rested, through focus and careful work.

Interestingly, it also works on toddlers. Watching Bean at the koi pond, I realized she was capable of calm, if presented with an opportunity for it. We needed more of this in our lives, less of everything else.

I might not be able to contain The Toddler Chaos, but I could certainly create an environment around it that promotes calm. I control her physical environment, what activities she goes to, and my interactions with her. If I altered all of those under this overarching goal of promoting calm, would that have long term benefits? Would it have short term benefits? Is her propensity to fight brushing her teeth, getting dressed, putting shoes on actually her way of responding to the whirlwind I create?

So, descending from Portland, I put all of this to work, analyzing each of the ways in which I feed the toddler chaos, and changing what I could. It’s been pretty fascinating so far. More next week.