I actually can’t count how many times a friend, an article, or a news report has recommended that the best way to deal with 2020 anxiety is to meditate. To which I am constantly asking: WHEN? Chris Hemsworth feels my pain. And he just made a series of videos illustrating what parents go through when they try to practice meditation or any kind of self-care this year with children in the house.
“Is it just me, or is it getting harder and harder to find a place where you can just get away from it all?” Hemsworth asks in a series of videos for his wellness app Centr aptly titled “Affirmations That Positively Absolutely Probably (Most Likely) WILL NOT Make Your 2020 Worse.” The best of them features the Thor actor sitting on the bottom of his pool, apparently the only place he could find peace and quiet. Except not.
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“Imagine yourself far, far away from wherever you’ve been stuck lately,” he says in voiceover as we watch him struggling to remain crosslegged underwater. “There are no distractions here. Nothing to break your calm. No one demanding your attention.”
Except as he says this, one of his sons swims into the frame.
“Simply push your worries away,” he goes on, physically pushing his son away, “until it’s just you, your thoughts and this moment of absolute tranquility.”
The boy — we’re not sure whether it’s Sasha or Tristan, his 6-year-old twins — keeps buzzing past his dad. He is both the very manifestation of those thoughts that intrude whenever we try to meditate, and also just like every child who notices their parent is trying to do something for themselves.
“It’s just you and me,” he says. “God, this kid. Ok maybe let’s try this another time.”
In other videos he’s interrupted by his dog, buzzing bees, and ocean waves. It’s pretty hilarious, but also maybe quite helpful. Because now the next time I try to sit and meditate in whatever three-minute window my husband, dog, and child give me, I can also picture Chris Hemsworth sitting in the ocean. Brilliant, right?
This is also 1,000 times better than Hemsworth’s other parenting hack that he shared with Jimmy Kimmel earlier in 2020: avoiding kid duties by heading out on his ride-on mower.
“It’s usually around school time that the lawns need to be mowed, conveniently,” he said. “‘Honey, that lawn’s growing. It’s a jungle out there. I gotta get to it, sorry.’”
