Life is Messy

Working with young children is a messy job.

As preschool teachers, we spend a good part of every day dealing with actual bodily discharges: tears, drool, snot, vomit, urine, feces, blood. When we're not doing that, we're likely dealing with messy eating, messy emotions, messy social situations, and messy play, not to mention the messiness of all those developing immune systems responding to the bacteria, viruses, toxins, and parasites. 

That, the sheer mess of it, is the reason that many people could never do what we do. It would drive them batty. It also, at least in part, explains why we are held in such low regard by the world: in a society that values status, dealing with mess is the work of those on the bottom rungs . . . Although, if you talk to any ex-President, they'll likely tell you that dealing with messes, often of their own making, is the work of those at the very top as well. And, well, it's also pretty much the work of anyone anywhere no matter their status. 

Life is messy and we spend most of our time dealing with it.

I know a guy who has his socks organized in drawers, each pair rolled up in its separate compartment. When he moved from one home to another, he tasked the movers with packing those socks into boxes while maintaining exactly the same grid so that upon arrival in his new home they would not mix them up while unpacking. He couldn't bear the thought of his socks being messy even while in transit. He lives alone and never entertains. You can sometimes get him to go out to dinner, but only at restaurants he knows and he always gets the same thing, which takes him 10 minutes to order because he has so many special instructions for the kitchen. About half the time, he winds up sending it back. He's a sought after and respected architect, but he only seems to be truly happy within the purity of his blueprints.

Being a human being, and especially a new one, is a messy business. It's unpredictable. Most of the coloring is outside the lines. The distance between two points is, at best, a zig zag. I'm pretty sure that the first person to say, "Man plans, and God laughs" was working with young children. Herding kittens or pushing water up hill would be easier and more orderly tasks.

Education dilettantes, especially those with backgrounds in business, are forever looking at our messiness and suggesting ways to make things run more tidily, like their factories. They offer us curricula or classroom management or social-emotional flow charts that pretend to make a reliable system of what we do. They even, laughably, insist that if we would just stick to their human resource inspired methods that we'll produce consistent and reliable educational results, you know, like the widgets that come off their assembly lines, each indistinguishable from the next.

As my friends in the south say, bless their little hearts.

Tidiness, order, systems, blueprints . . . These are not real things. They are theories that humans attempt to impose on a messy universe. Even mathematics is messy. As science fiction author Ursula Le Guin writes, "(U)p close, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern." Indeed, life itself teaches us that each day reveals new patterns while showing us the old ones anew, in a different light, from a different perspective, deepening it for us, revealing complexity, and forever defying our attempts to shape it into grids that will be the same when we unpack the moving box.

This is what preschool teachers know. We are the ultimate realists because we are the ones who understand, as we're down there on our knees tending to a snotty nose, that we live in a world that defies our attempts to organize it like socks in a drawer. And the young children we work with know this even more intimately than we do. They know that we spend our days doing the "hard job" of life, pushing and pulling and tugging it into shape, and doing the same with ourselves, only to awake the following morning to find it's once more a mess as our noses run and our hearts pound and our eyes fill with tears of both joy and sorrow. It's all dirt and rocks.

The other thing we know that the dilettantes and sock-drawer architects will never quite grasp is that there's more to life than trying to organize dirt and rocks, or deal with bodily discharges. Indeed, that's just the day to day work of it. The beauty, the purpose, the meaning requires embracing the mess while never losing sight of the actual, wonderful, brand new, fully-formed humans who are here to show us the world anew. As Le Guin puts it, "You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon . . . If you can see the whole, it seems that it's always beautiful."

Most people spend their lives avoiding the bodily discharges, the mess, only to find that it will always find them, although, perhaps, with a lot of fussing, they might manage to organize their sock drawer, that place of pure theory that has nothing to do with life itself. They can always find their socks, but then what?

A few days after my architect friend moved into his new home, I met him for coffee and noticed his bare ankles. I teased him, "You have a million socks. What's the deal with no socks?" He answered with a shrug, "I finally got them how I like them." 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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.

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