In the past week, we’ve seen conversation vary in color, pitch and tone. Humanity has learned, once again, what it means to mourn online. There’s a brackish tide of emotions washing over all of us from all sides. The seas smack against the rocks. Hate spreads and burns us up. Sadness blankets our thoughts. But the beauty and bother of our interconnectedness are the multicolored, ambi-textured strokes on the canvas of our lives. We are witness to a push and pull of emotion, we mould it and it moulds us. We console each other and coagulate these feelings.

One moment that caught my attention, and my breath, was a video with a French boy and his father. Give it a watch.

Flowers. No matter your stance on guns, war, drones, terrorism — in many countries and cultures — we are parents who have to answer to our children about the evil that resides in our world.

“But there’s bad guys, papa.”

“Yes, but there’s bad guys everywhere.”

This father chose to give his son hope. This boy will someday soon know what it means to be afraid again, and what depths we can sink. Until then, we have flowers and candles. We can have hope. We can be unafraid. We will keep building in spite of the destruction and all the reasons we have to hate each other.

“They might have guns, but we have flowers.”

Until the flowers won’t grow any longer, I will protect you, my sons.

How have you spoken to you children about what happened? What can we learn from these moments?