The Right Place At The Right Time With The Right People

FOMO: the fear of missing out. 

We didn't have an acronym for it when I was teen, but we felt it. It stood at the icky, insecure core of my high school social life in fact, one that was comprised of going to house parties where we all asked one another if we'd heard about the other, presumedly cooler, party that was raging in a cooler house with cooler music and included the coolest people. People so cool, that we had never even heard of them even though we were in a two high school town in which everyone already knew everyone.

Up though middle school, I'd not experienced much of the icky, insecure FOMO. Oh sure, there were times I missed out on something or other, but it didn't plague me the way it did when I was 15, 16, and 17 when I would brace myself every Monday morning: not because of school, but because I knew I would hear about all the very cool things I'd missed over the weekend. 

As a freshman at the University of Oregon, I was invited to an off-campus party. There were old people there. And by that I mean people over 30, but there were even some people older than that. There was a live band of old men playing familiar music (I later learned that one of the members of this pick up group was Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir). There was another very old man, past 50, who spent the entire party ignoring the rest of us to play with a couple of children in the living room. He seemed so peaceful, so happy, so "at home." He was in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. It turned out that he was author Ken Kesey. 

I sometimes think that this was when the seed was planted that has grown, though twisted and turned, into Teacher Tom.

Shortly after the experience of that party, I vowed that I wasn't going to let the thing we today call FOMO get to me any more. Whenever I felt the urge rising, I'd think of Ken Kesey there on the floor at peace with the children. I'd say to myself, "I'm in the coolest place doing the coolest thing with the coolest people." I would even sometimes say it aloud to those cool people who were with me and they would always agree, often with cheers. 

Cognitive psychology tells us that every time we recall something from our past, we alter it and that the more often we recall a specific moment the less our memory has in common with the reality of what actually happened. People say you can't change the past, but we do it all the time. The past stays alive only through the stories we tell about it and it's those stories, not the actual events, that inform the present. It's how those moments made us feel that doesn't change. 

As the Chief says in Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, ". . . it's the truth even if it didn't happen." To this day, I regularly recall Ken Kesey on the floor playing with children, although it shows up for me more in the form of a pictogram or hieroglyph than a full-blown story: an image that makes me feel the peace and joy of being in the right place at the right time with the right people. No one feels less icky, insecure FOMO than a preschooler. After decades with them, I realize that the children's innate wisdom is a big part of how I've been able to keep that young man's vow to myself. 

I've often written here on the blog about the cruelty of standard schools fomenting the entirely unscientific notion of children "falling behind." (Here is the post I wrote last week.) Whenever I write about it, I find myself emotional, angry, righteous, like a protector or champion. I've recently had the epiphany that the ultimate cruelty of "falling behind" is that it viciously injects FOMO into the garden of early childhood. The kids may be immune to the icky, insecure FOMO, but their parents sure aren't. They are made to feel that their child will somehow miss out on straight A's, prestigious grad schools, and lucrative careers if they don't live up to their arbitrary standards and norms. It's icky, insecure FOMO by proxy. So these parents, in turn, pressure and fret over their babies, instead of simply getting down on the floor and playing with them. And when they do that, they miss out on the one thing that really matters: the joy of being in the right place at the right time with the right people.

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"This inspiring book is essential reading for every family choosing a preschool, every teacher working with young children, and every citizen who wonders how we can raise children who will make the world a better place." ~Dr. Laura Markham, author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids

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