"There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth"

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. ~Shakespeare, Hamlet

I recently passed a man on the street, shabbily dressed, shoeless, and dirty. I don't know where he sleeps at night, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he regularly lies down in doorways or under bridges. He was standing in front of a wall of tinted office windows, apparently seeing his own reflection. Both his expression and body were twisted into shapes that spoke of agony. He was soundlessly going through something either mentally or physically painful -- perhaps both.

The sight of him had woken me from a reverie. I'd been recalling a day from my childhood, one that had been perfumed with the scent of pine trees and damp earth. My body had been walking along a city sidewalk, but I'd been far away, both in terms of time and space, but this man's presence, his evident pain, brought me suddenly into the present where the dominate fragrance was heated concrete and exhaust.

As I approached the man whose body writhed, turning first in upon itself then back out, I wondered if I'd been wrong. Maybe he was just playing with his reflection the way we often do as children, making faces, contorting bodies. Whatever the case, he was in his own world, possibly somewhere that was perfumed by pine trees and damp earth. At least it seemed that way because he didn't seem to take note of me, nor any of the other passersby. Whatever the case, his was a place made more profoundly separate from mine, I expect, by mental illness.

The world in which he was dwelling, that place of pain or pine or something else entirely, was the creation of his senses and his consciousness, just as that interrupted place of pine-scented memory had been the creation of mine. Science reporter Ed Yong, in his book An Immense World, writes about the line from Hamlet at the top of this post, "The quote is often taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural. I see it rather as a call to better understand the natural. Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations. Philosophers have long pitied the goldfish in its bowl, unaware of what lies beyond, but our senses create a bowl around us too--one that we generally fail to penetrate."

He quotes writer Marcel Proust as saying, "The only true voyage . . . would be not too visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes . . . to see the hundred universes that each of them sees."

Yong is writing about the immense world of the senses and how they allow other species to experience the world in ways we cannot imagine. Indeed, most species even possess senses that we can't even imagine, like the ability to map their world through magnetism or communicate through the exchange of pheromones. We cannot comprehend the world of vibrations in which many spiders live or the ultraviolet colors of a hummingbird's. Each species has a unique Umwelt, which is the word scientists use to describe the sensory fishbowl in which we are all confined.

As I considered this man who was clearly going through something, I realized I was contemplating his unique Umwelt, trying to "possess other eyes." Of course, being human, if I had been truly committed to understanding, I would have spoken to him, perhaps asking the question, "Are you okay?" or "Can I help you?" words of compassion that may or may not have been warranted or welcome. "Language," writes Yong, "for us, is both blessing and curse. It gives us the tools for describing another animal's Umwelt even as it insinuates our own sensory world into those descriptions."

But this wasn't just another animal, he was one of my own species. The only way I could have possibly understood what he was going through would have been to engage in dialog. My fear, my selfishness, my hurry, however, overwhelmed my curiosity and I ultimately walked on by, leaving me in my fishbowl with nothing other than my judgments and assumptions, which likely have nothing to do with this man I saw playing with his own reflection. Indeed, in a very real sense, that's what I was doing as well: seeing him as a reflection of me.

As those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are returning to school, we, as educators, are tasked, first and foremost, with understanding the children who are coming into our lives. Perhaps we've read descriptions of the children as provided by their previous teachers or maybe we've listened to parents tell us about them, but if we are going to be any good to these children at all, we must cast aside our assumptions and enter into dialog with each of them. It needn't be a dialog made of language. In fact, when we are talking about very young children, language often only teaches us about the limitations of our own fishbowls. It's a dialog made of all the senses, one that involves as Eleanor Duckworth says, "listening with our entire selves." That's what penetrates and connects our Umwelt with theirs.

It doesn't matter what your curriculum tells you to do, this is where it starts and this is where it ends, with a genuine commitment to understanding these humans. The hallmark of a real education is one that penetrates our fishbowls to discover that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy.

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The free live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Suzanne Axelsson, Lisa Murphy, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Kisha Reid, Mr. Chazz Lewis, Monique Gray Smith, Vanessa LaPointe and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow.  Click here to learn more!

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