To Get Close to Things

"This is my home," she told me, settling into a curl of blanket populated by stuffed animals. "This is my bedroom over here. That's my living room. Over there is the play room . . . " 

She had called me over to tell me this. She had been playing by herself all morning in this corner of the classroom under the loft. She'd not had help, nor had she asked for it. Even now she was not asking for help. Indeed, she was barely looking at me as she detailed the home she had created for herself.

Her self-satisfied manner made it clear she was not seeking validation or advice. The information she conveyed was not urgent or even essential, for either of us. 

"(I)n the end," writes physicist and philosopher Carol Rovelli, "it seems to me, the real purpose of language is not to communicate. It is to get close to things, to be in relation with them . . . when we speak with friends, with the people we love, do we really speak in order to tell them something? Don't we really use the excuse of wanting to tell them something in order to be able to speak with them?"

Obviously, there are times when we seek to convey information or to persuade one another, but most of what we say is relational. When a baby sees a dog, points, and says, "Woof woof," I suppose they may well be attempting to edify us, but it seems more likely  that this urge to call out and point is really about the delight in connecting both with us and with the world. This is how we come to create a shared understanding of the world, by weaving a shared web of connections between people, places, things, and experiences. 

The school-ish notions of teaching cause us to center everything we do with young children under the lens of learning. What is being learned? What can I say to scaffold the learning? What are they asking me to teach them? But the instinct, which manifests through play, is really about this process of being in relation with the world. The weaving of connections may result in understanding, but that isn't the goal. The goal is to "get close to things."

When we understand this, I think, it helps us know what to do as important adults in the lives of young children. Ours is not to intentionally shape or steer them, but rather to join them in their delight. To point along with them and connect our "woof woof" with theirs. To listen to them as they tell us about their homes of blankets and stuffies that connect to other homes and other stuffies they know. 

In Rovelli's world of physics, energy and mass are known to be "two facets of the same entity, just as the electric and magnetic fields are two faces of the same field, and as space and time are two facets of one thing, spacetime." Electrons don't even exist except in the moment they are interacting with something else: these fundamental particles only exist within the context of relationship.

This is likewise true of us. When the baby points or when a girl shows us their game they aren't really attempting to communicate about dogs or homes. That's their excuse to speak with us, to connect, to weave themselves into the magnificent web of relationships that from the oneness of reality. We've spent centuries considering the world's separate parts only to learn that everything may well be simply facets of the same thing.

The girl surveyed her home in silence, her need to speak now sated, but her hands, her eyes, her full self continued to weave herself into her world.

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