"You Climbed Up There!"

"Teacher Tom, look at me!"

The boy called out from where he stood, clinging to the trunk of one of our playground cedars. He was standing on a root that raised him no more than six inches off the ground. If he had fallen, it wouldn't have been a fall.

"Baby steps" is the expression we use in moments like this: the first, tentative attempt to push the boundaries of our fear. A baby's first step is an act of falling forward, then trusting their legs to break that fall. I've had the privilege to witness several first steps and each time, the baby smiles. I don't know if it's from the thrill of accomplishment or a response to the adults who are cheering them on. I expect it's a bit of both.

The boy on the root was smiling as he called out to me. To be honest, I wasn't at first sure what he wanted me to look at so I said, "I'm looking at you!" matching my enthusiasm to his own. I knew this four-year-old boy to be intellectually precocious, but physically timid, not inclined toward what we generally think of when we worry about "risky play." It was this prior knowledge of his personality rather than my own concerns for his safety that allowed me to figure out that he wanted me as a witness to his act of courage. I added, "You climbed up there!"

As adults, we tend to be pretty good at responding to children who climb "too high," go "too fast," or play "too roughly." In fact, if you've read here for any length of time, you'll know that I think we tend to overreact, too often allowing our own catastrophic imaginations to take over. I suppose it's natural, on the other hand, that we often miss acknowledging these baby step acts of courage because they don't trigger our own fears. I mean, no one's going to get hurt falling from six inches.

Courage doesn't mean the same thing as fearless. For any act to be courageous, it must be done against a background of fear. Fear is necessary. "Complete certainty, safety, and a life of no fear is impossible," writes Brandon Webb in his book Mastering Fear. "There'll never be a point in your life where you'll think, "now's the right time, I'm totally prepared and at ease" . . . If you wait for fear to go away first, you'll never do it. Because the fear is never going away."

This boy stepped onto that root despite his fear. He thought he might be able to do it, but feared he would fall or fail or somehow get hurt. Every courageous act requires us to act in the face of this uncertainty. At some point, each of us must act without knowing, then live with the consequences. This, I think, is what defines human freedom.

It was nothing to be personally, but for this boy, this baby step was a transformative one. There is no second step without the first one. There he clung to that trunk, thrilled to be free. As the Ancient Greek historian and general put it, "The secret to freedom is courage." So we are meant to go, by both baby steps and by the giant steps of the gods, from one act of courage to the next, acting in the face of our fears, acting in the face of uncertainty. This is, in the end, what a life of purpose and meaning is all about.

As that boy stood there on his root, a girl who, like the boy, I knew to be intellectually precocious, yet physically timid, stepped carefully onto a slightly lower root beside him. The boy encouraged her, echoing me, "You climbed up there!"

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Disappointed, Jolly, and Longing for More

My own child as well as all the nieces and nephews are young adults, which means that our Christmas Days have been evolving over the past few years into a less child-centric experience. We're here in New York to spend the holiday with our daughter. Yesterday's plan was a lazy, late morning gift exchange followed by a movie and Chinese food. 

It was all a proper NYC Christmas until we arrived at the movie theater only to be told that the showing for which we'd held tickets for months, and had looked forward to, was cancelled due to "burst pipes." That sucked. 

It didn't just suck for us. The flooding impacted most of the theater's showings for the day, which left hundreds, if not thousands of us, with the same disappointment. 

As we tried to figure out if there was another movie at another theater we could see, I watched the poor woman assigned to inform customers of the situation. She was promising refunds and handing out vouchers. Most seemed to understand, but she was also taking some abuse. Talk about sucking. This was not how she imagined things going when she came into work on Christmas morning.

The movie business was struggling before the pandemic, but then took a nosedive from which it's never recovered. Theaters are closing across the country. Turning away customers on the busiest movie day of the year really sucks for this theater's bottom line which will likely impact everyone who works there.

We ended up taking a taxi across town to see a movie we'd never heard of (A Better Man), a biopic about a pop star none of us had ever heard of (Robbie Williams), in which, for reasons never fully explained, the lead was played by a CGI chimpanzee . . . It wasn't bad. In fact, well before the chimp's fame had brought it to the predictable decent into drug abuse and alcoholism, we were once more a jolly bunch. 

I know that we weren't the only ones to go through disappointment on what is meant to be a merry holiday. Indeed, in the scheme of things, ours was an incredibly minor one compared to the disappointments of, for instance, children whose Christmas morning hopes were unfulfilled. Our disappoint was nothing compared to the disappointments of those who hoped that this year they would forge a new relationship with difficult relatives, or that their happy day would not be spoiled by bickering, or who burned the dinner. The truth is that for many of us, these big holidays are often a big disappointment, which accounts, I suppose, for much of the depression associated with this time of year.

Having a bad day is one thing. Having it against the backdrop of a day set aside for being "jolly," "merry," and "happy" is another. Even our most perfect holidays are marred, at least a little, by disappointment, because few things live up to our greatest hopes or go according to our best laid plans. There are those who tell us that we can choose to be happy, even when things go wrong, but try telling that to the kid who didn't get the toy they fully expected. As adults we can dismiss their tears as "nothing to cry about," but that doesn't make the experience of having one's hopes dashed any less painful. 

The reality of disappointment makes cynics of some of us all of the time and all of us some of the time. If we just start by expecting the worst, the theory goes, then we can at least be pleasantly surprised when the worst doesn't happen. It's a protective stance that perhaps dampens the disappointment, but it also leaves us without the anticipation, without the hope.

Anthropologist David Graeber tells us that our medieval ancestors understood this phenomenon in a way that our consumption-based economy makes difficult for modern humans to comprehend. It's natural to desire a wonderful thing, like a perfect holiday, but trying to possess it, fulfill it, or consume it is another matter. "Anyone who got the idea that one could resolve the matter by "embracing" the object of his or her fantasy was missing the point. The very idea was considered a symptom of a profound mental disorder, a species of "melancholia" . . . This leads to the interesting suggestion that from the perspective of this particular form of medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization . . . is really a form of clinical depression." We shop, we plan, we anticipate, but the truth is we always just miss our heart's desire, leaving us with an emptiness that can only be filled by . . . more shopping, planning, and anticipating. The assumption of capitalism is that we will never be sated. The goal of our medieval predecessors was far more reasonable: not to try to possess perfection, but rather to preserve our longing for it.

By the time we sat down to our dinner, we were jovially debating the strange artistic choice to make Robbie Williams a chimp. Was it distracting or inspired? It definitely makes the movie more memorable than the other myriad pop star biopics, but did it make it better? You know, exactly the kind of post cinema conversation one anticipates and even hopes for. We ordered too much food and had an extra round of drinks. We laughed and reminisced and found ourselves by the end of the evening in a holiday mood. It will, going forward, be known as the "monkey man" Christmas, the year, like all the others, that didn't go according to plan, but nevertheless followed tradition, leaving us yet again disappointed, jolly, and longing for more.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Last Minute Gift Ideas!

We've been bombarded with "last minute" gift idea promotions since at least mid-November, but now, finally, the last minute is truly upon us. As a public service I offer Teacher Tom's last minute gift ideas for children, most of which won't even require a trip to a mall or an Amazon delivery.

Mesh produce bags.

Things that rot.

A place to leave things to rot . . .

. . . and worms to live there.

Sticks.

An old typewriter.

Concrete.

Dominoes.

Tape.

Sand.

Blocks.

Hammers.

Drills.

Boxes and balls.

Nuts, bolts, wrenches and screwdrivers . . .

. . . rubber bands . . .

. . . and put them all together.

Glue guns.

Cars.

Dolls . . .

. . . who need bandages.

Shipping pallets.

Rocks.

Water, gutters, tubes and shovels.

Paint.

Yarn.

Step ladders . . .

. . . and homemade ladders.

Tree parts.

Ropes.

Buckets.

Plants.

Junk . . .

 . . . and jewels.

Happy holidays!

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Even the Sun Stands Still

I've been awaking to darkness for the last few weeks. I’d have to say that the short winter days are one of the most challenging aspects of life in the northern tier, but things are turning around. The Winter Solstice occurred on the west coast of the US Saturday at 1:20 a.m., marking the end of our ever-longer nights and the return of light.

Not to lessen the significance of Christmas, Hanukkah or any of the other festivals of lights, but this astrological event is the original reason for the season. The Earth is tilted on its axis at, on average, a 23.5-degree angle and today is when the North Pole was farthest from the sun, causing it to appear to rise and set in the same place. We call it the first day of winter, and while the days will now grow longer by increments until the Summer Solstice in June, the average temperature of the “top” part of the globe will continue to drop as the oceans slowly lose the heat they still store from the warm summer months.

Humans can hardly think without resorting to metaphor and there is none more profound than this. It’s not an accident that this is a time for reflection as well as celebrating new beginnings. It’s not an accident that we seek out the people who mean the most to us, family and friends, those we love and without whom we live in perpetual winter. It’s not an accident that Christians retell the story of the birth of a child, the son of God, the light of hope in a darkened world. It’s not an accident that we give one another gifts and wish each other merriness, happiness and cheer – the darkness is passing, buck up, light is returning, have hope.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for death, but the comparison is superficial. The trees may not have leaves, the forests may have been temporarily emptied by hibernation and migration, there may be fewer children on the play grounds and at the beaches, and it may stay that way for some months to come, but we shouldn't mistake stillness for death.

The word “Solstice” comes from the Latin phrase for “sun stands still.” We spend the rest of the year in motion, moving forward, making progress. But if we can hold still long enough to listen, we hear winter whispering to slow down, take stock, cut back, rest, tend to the core of what makes life worthy of its name. All is calm. All is bright.

Even the sun stands still.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!