The Meaning Of Life

Every human society that has ever existed was built around the biological imperative to care for the children.

"Figuring out why being a parent is worthwhile isn't just a personal or biological question, but a social and political one, too. Caring for children has never, in all of human history, just been the role of the biological mothers and fathers. From the very beginning it's been a central project for any community of human beings. This is still true. Education, for example, is simply caring for children broadly conceived. ~Alison Gopnik

All "higher order" animals must care for their young, but none are born as helpless and for as long as human babies. From a purely evolutionary perspective the species won't survive if the children don't survive so we must care for them. The question for every society is "How?"

As a boy, I was raised during the Cold War, and was subject to a great deal of propaganda around the evils of Soviet Union style communism. One of the things we were told was that Russian mothers had their babies taken from them shortly after birth so that they could get back to work, and that those babies were institutionalized to be raised not by their parents but by "the state." I don't know if this was true or not, but when I look around and see how many American babies are today being primarily raised by paid caregivers in places that could certainly be characterized as institutions, I don't find it unimaginable.

Having been, in my way, a professional caregiver for a good part of my adult life, having known thousands of others, and having spent time in hundreds of these "institutions," I am not necessarily here to criticize how our society is answering the central "How?" other than to point out that if this is the way we're going to do it, we need more and less expensive options. Of course, I have my opinions and I have my ideas for reform, which is what underpins the 3000+ posts in this blog's decade long history. And you have your opinions and ideas. One of the strengths of the way we have chosen to answer "How?" is that "the state" has, for the most part, left that to be answered by individuals. One of the weaknesses of our answer to "How?" is that our economy is organized in such a way that it all too often leaves individuals, especially lower income individuals, with little choice.

I think it's safe to say that there are very few parents who are entirely happy with the way we are answering "How?" either societally or individually. Yes, I know some parents who are joyfully homeschooling, for instance, unconcerned about the economic or career consequences. I know other loving parents who are thrilled with their child's paid caregivers, institutional or otherwise, confident that their child is being sufficiently nurtured in their absence. And I imagine there are some who simply accept things the way they are, like, we were told, those Russian mothers, who were resigned to reality. But most of us are torn. Most of us know that there must be a better way to answer the question of "How?"

I don't think that there is any doubt that caring for children is the central project of humanity, yet when I look around it's clear that we, as a society, treat it as almost an afterthought. Our political parties do not seek to build society around this central project. Our economic entities do not. When people ask what we do, only the lowly paid caregivers speak of caring for the children. And while there are plenty of stay-at-home parents who proudly assert our role, we all know that the "good for you" lip-service that people give us in response is a slightly embarrassed admission of our low status.

I wonder what would happen if we could somehow find the courage to step back and acknowledge that caring for children is the central project of every community. We complain that we're disconnected. Mental illness is at near-plague levels. We crave something more meaningful, deeper, better, and we know we won't find it in more stuff, inebriation, or working harder, even as we continue to search for it there. We're showing the symptoms of a society that has forgotten why we are here: we are here to care for children. The rest is in support of that.

And at the core of caring for children is love. We are reminded of this each time a child cries when they are left:

"But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life." ~Carlo Rovelli

Caring for children is the central project of humankind. And at the center of that is love, which is the meaning of life.

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What We Are Doing To Young Children In The Name Of "Instructional Time"

At the beginning of the 2015 school year Seattle's Public School teachers were on strike. They had a list of demands, most of which were ultimately met, including the requirement that all elementary school children receive a minimum of 30 minutes a day on the playground. As pathetic as that victory might sound to those of us who live and work in the world of play-based education, some schools were limiting their charges to 15 minutes of recess over a school day. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in America and indeed many other parts of the world.

As heartlessly cruel as this sounds, it's the result of administrators and teachers who have bought into the entirely unsupported myth that more "instructional time" will result in "better results," and that every moment of free play, especially outdoors, is a waste of time. Meanwhile, 17 million children worldwide have been prescribed addictive stimulants (like Ritalin), antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs for "educational" and behavioral problems, over half of them in the US. Already one in ten American students are on these drugs and the fastest growing segment are children five and under.

This from the UK: 

Tests to assess . . . children's physical development at the start of the first school year found that almost a third to be "of concern" for lack of motor skills and reflexes. Almost 90 per cent of children demonstrated some degree of movement difficulty for their age . . . The tests suggest up to 30 per cent of children are starting school with symptoms typically associated with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and ADHD -- conditions which can be improved with correct levels of physical activity, experts say.

What's to blame? Lack of physical play is a big part of it, but there's more. According researcher Dr. Rebecca Duncombe:

"Young children have access to iPads and are much more likely to be sat in car seats or chairs . . . But the problem can also be attributed to competitive parenting -- parents who want they children to walk as soon as possible risk letting them miss out on key mobility developments which help a child to find their strength and balance."

And why do we have competitive parenting: because our schools, indeed our entire educational environment, is built around the idea of competition; around the cruel caution that "You don't want your child to fall behind." Bill Gates and his ilk have succeeded in "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children and this is the result. Because we have to get them ready for the "competitive job market of tomorrow," we've herded them indoors, where they spend their days locked in being force-fed "knowledge" like it's some sort of factory farm. It's so bad that we have to drug them. It's so bad that 90 percent of our four-year-olds aren't even getting the opportunity to learn how to move their bodies properly. The only other human institutions of which I'm aware that regularly drug and confine people are prisons and mental wards.

Instead of understanding the truth about young children -- that they need to move their bodies, a lot, and preferably outdoors -- we have created a very, very narrow range of "normal" into which we are forcing our children. This is outrageous. It's malpractice. And it's on all of us for letting it happen.

I usually try to end these posts on a positive or hopeful note, but the best I can do right now is to say that at least Seattle's Public School kids are getting their 30 minutes a day outdoors . . . Unless, of course, they are being punished, because taking away recess is one of the more common "consequences" for children who can't sit still and focus. And if they fail too often, we drug them.

Parents: the more time your children spend outdoors, playing, the smarter they will be. Create it at home and demand if from our schools. Teachers: the more time your students spend outdoors, playing, the smarter they will be. Create it at school and demand more of it from your administrators. This is the science. This is what we know about children. What's happening now is nothing short of institutionalized child abuse and we're all a part of permitting it to happen.

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Everything You Need To Know About Lesson Plans

When I was a junior businessman back in my twenties, people were always talking about plans: first came the mission statement, then some objectives or goals, then strategies, then tactics. You couldn't start anything without a written plan. I'd learned how to write various types of business proposals in college and had found that I had the sort of personality that enjoyed piecing them together. I liked creating the internal logic that made them, to my mind, works of art. I liked how one could make them flow from one thing to the next, almost like a work of fiction, and I especially liked the challenge of making doughy ideas sound like something make from concrete. From the very start, I understood these plans to be sales documents. Never once did it occur to me that anyone, myself included, would actually adhere to these plans once the "sale" was made.

Even as a young man, I'd learned that life is too uncertain for plans, at least not ones that go into such mechanistic detail. Certainly, they provide a starting line (which is always right now) and indicate in which direction to take our first steps (which is always one foot in front of the other). And I suppose plans serve as a way to sort of organize a group of people around a common cause, but no matter how much we plan, we are soon making prat falls, getting lost, learning new things, finding our assumptions were way off, encountering unexpected obstacles, having new ideas, warring with previously unknown enemies, and generally, you know, living life.

I summoned the courage one day to express these thoughts to a more seasoned businessman who assured me that I was right, saying, "If your plan is not a living thing, it is a dead thing," which is why most plans, most of the time, wind up bearing little resemblance to what actually happens: they are written in stone which is dead, immovable, and heavy to lug around. The plans that actually come to fruition are the ones that are spoken into the air, existing only while they are useful, then forgotten as the next plan is spoken.

Someone recently asked me about "lesson plans," those ubiquitous blueprints that many teachers are expected to draft on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, detailing what the children they teach will be doing and learning throughout the day. I feel much the same way about these plans as I did business plans. The closest I've ever come to drafting a lesson plan is that I sometimes write down a list of "activities" or materials I think the children might want to have available to them on any given day, a list to jog my own memory based upon conversations and observations from the day or hour or minute before. In other words, the self-made plans the children have "spoken into the air." In a play-based curriculum, the children's own ideas form the lesson plan. I am there to support their projects as best I can understand them and when they have their inevitable prat falls, get lost, learn new things, find their assumptions are way off, encounter obstacles, have new ideas, and war with enemies, I am there to support them in their revised, living, plans as well.

I had a business colleague, a young man about my age, who posted inspirational quotations on the walls of his cubicle. One of them read: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Another said, "Plan your work. Work your plan." What grim counsel to give, especially to a young person. Where is the room for living, for getting lost, for taking the scenic route? I imagine that there are some teachers who swear by their lesson plans, but most of the teachers I know are only going through the motions to satisfy a requirement of their employment, creating documents that can be put in a file, plans that are as dead as dead can be. These teachers know that the real lesson plan is the one that the children themselves bring to life each time they exhale.

I know some teachers who subversively wait until the end of the day to write their lesson plans. Those are the only "plans" to which anyone has ever adhered.

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We Have Love On Our Side

Psychologist Carl Jung wrote, "Where love rules there is not will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking." This, I think, is an important thing upon which modern educators in general, and early childhood educators in particular, could stand to meditate.

I strive to place love at the center of my practice, as I know is true of most of my colleagues. We genuinely love the children we teach and they love us. I've witnessed this to be widely true wherever I've visited. It's perhaps our greatest reward (because it sure isn't financial). When it goes as it should, we spend our days loving and being loved, swimming in it, breathing it. Our job is to keep them safe and to otherwise simply be there, loving them and helping them as they figure out how to connect with, to love, more people. This is the foundation of not just all learning, but all living in the fullest sense of the word.

When I look at our habitual idea of schooling, I see a lot of loving individual teachers working in a system in which love has been pushed to the side, and where power therefore predominates. From our earliest years, we are judged by our educational system, one that pretends to know what is normal and to then acts to enforce it. The French philosopher Michel Foucault sees this as an exercise in power, a form he calls "normalization," in which our souls are imprisoned by expectations and standards and this has characterized our schools right up to our current era of high stakes standardized testing which has come to dominate the educational experience for most of our children.

It's a system of power that appears largely designed to create "normal" children rather educated ones, where those that cannot bend to the will of the system are labelled, then subjected to increasingly overt forms of power, right up to the use of force, which is ultimately a failure of power. They must either "learn" how to behave or find themselves rejected. It's a power, however, that isn't derived so much from the threat of force as from the capacity to label: this one is "normal" and that one is "abnormal," and it can only exist as a poor replacement for the love that should stand at the center, but has been pushed aside.

I watched a baby on my flight home from visiting our daughter in New York over a long weekend, and what I saw was a free human. Sure, he was 100 percent dependent upon the adult humans in his life, yet because love clearly stood at the center of his relationships with those important adults, this dependency didn't translate into them exerting power over him. Instead of "behaving," he shouted when he felt the urge, grabbed whatever was within reach, bounced furiously, cried from his belly, and everyone around him considered this to be "normal." You do too. This is just what babies do. By the same token, when his two-year-old brother whined or cried or kicked the seats in front of him, people around me shook their heads and pursed their lips, as if to say, "This mother needs to gain control over her child," to exert power over him. That is to say, this slightly older human cannot be allowed to be free.

Thankfully, this mother on this six hour flight did not replace her love with power, but I couldn't help but reflect that it was, sadly, only a matter of time.

Of course, we are all subject to Foucault's normalized power. We allow society to exert its power over us. We don't shout and cry on airplanes, even when we may often feel like it. And when one of us does "lose it," the rest tend to agree that he ought to be removed from the plane. Although if we think beyond our own comfort and the arbitrary confines of "normal," I expect we can all see how love would be a more appropriate response to that troubled individual than an exercise in power.

I know there are some teachers who have become creatures of the system. I came across them in my own schooling: those who allow their will to power to dominate, who see success in terms of well-behaved, properly drilled students, turning out passing grades and high enough test scores, normal kids prepared for normal lives. Thankfully, most teachers have not lost touch with love and who, despite the demands of the our habitual schools to normalize children, set their love between the children and those demands, putting love first, especially for those who would whine and cry and kick the seats in front of them. These teachers are my heroes.

Our schools are not unique in having replaced power with love. Indeed, it has become the main focus of most of our institutions and professions to label what is normal and what is not, then to work to make as many of us normal as possible, to exert power over not just how we behave, but ultimately who we are.

It upsets me when I think that these free humans that we teach will all too soon find themselves increasingly subject to this normalized power, the systematic hammering down and smoothing out, the judgements and labels.


Ah, but we have love on our side. It is perhaps the only revolutionary force in that it is the only thing that can supplant power. When we celebrate heroes, it is always because they have loved where others would control. It is always because they have chosen to empower rather than exercise power. I am inspired by thinking about all of us preschool teachers out there in the world in our church basements and living rooms, our classrooms and playgrounds, fighting the power by simply loving. They think we are weak, but we are strong. We are the revolutionary force the world needs and we will win when we love.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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To Talk And Listen And Agree

As we gather for circle time I sing . . .

Come on over to the checker board rug.

Come on over to the checker board rug.

Come on over to the checker board rug

And have a seat on the floor.

Over the years it's become a kind of ritual, with the children often singing or humming along with me. Sometimes I goof on the lyrics, replacing "rug" with "slug” or "floor" with "ceiling." The children tend to delight in correcting me, telling me "No! That's not right," laughing together as they come together which is a good way to start, even if we're going to be discussing serious matters like feelings or work on forging agreements about how we want to treat one another. 

We are always unconsciously working on becoming a community, of course, in everything we do or say with one another, but circle time is where we consciously focus on creating it, each of us having the opportunity to both speak and listen, to disagree and agree, to assume our collective responsibility for the world in which we live. This is where we actively create our world.

As animals with certain, limited, abilities to perceive, we tend to experience reality as a concrete thing, something that exists outside of us, built of undeniable facts, and this, to a greater or lesser extent, shapes and limits all of us. Since the Enlightenment, at least, the dominant view of scientists, artists, and philosophers tended toward a "clockwork" view of the universe, everything ticking along according to an as yet unknowable (but perhaps someday knowable) plan, machine-like, inevitable, unstoppable. Humans were clockworks as well, our brains, our bodies, our chemistry all subject to the immutable laws of nature. But more recently, we've begun to understand that this is not the case at all, that rather than being subjects of reality, we are in fact creators of it.

What we see is not what we see, but rather points of reflected light from which our brains create what we see.

What we hear is not what we hear, but rather waves that our ears transform into vibrations, then electricity, that we then use to create what we hear.

What we taste is not what we taste, what we smell is not what we smell, what we remember is not what we remember: all of it is our brains and bodies (which are really the same thing) creating order from chaos. 

Sometimes when I call the children over to the checker board rug, I hum the song while rapidly vibrating a finger between my upper and lower lips, speed boat style. I'm not singing the words, but the children hear them, singing along, anticipating, creating the full song from their own brains. Insisting, in fact, that I am singing the words even when I demonstrate that I'm not. They are making reality together, which is what humans do.

It's mind blowing stuff: it's hard to wrap our brains around it. I think of the young children I wrote about yesterday, those humans who are born with the wisdom of the true nature of time, living in it not as a continuum, but an ever-emerging present. The younger humans are, the closer we seem to be to perceiving the universe as it really is. Then we gain experience. We learn to instead perceive the world the way the other humans do, with it's lies of perception: we believe in what we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, not because it is true, but rather because we've agreed that it's true.

On a day to day basis, I suppose, this all falls under the category of "true, but not necessarily useful." We are, after all, animals that have evolved to perceive the universe in a certain limited way, forever blocked from perspectives that would allow us to experience beyond our senses. Yet, if the scientists and artists and philosophers are correct, even this is a matter our own creation, individually and collectively. And looked at that way, perhaps it is useful. Perhaps it tells us that things are never hopeless. Maybe it allows us to know that change, even massive, sudden, earth-shaking change is possible, and it can happen in a moment if only we will come together on our checker board rugs to talk and listen and agree.

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This Is Real

I don't think I'm much different than the typical preschool teacher in that I choose to work with young children because, frankly, I love being with young children: their little fingers in my palm when we walk hand-in-hand, putting bandaids on invisible wounds, waiting and waiting and waiting for their words to catch up with their excited brains. When they allow me to comfort them by picking them up, there a few things more dear than the warmth of their tears as they soak through my shirt onto my shoulder. Helping them eat, changing their diapers, wiping their noses, it's in these small moments that we are doing our work.

That's as it should be. This is exactly where we ought to be with them if we are doing it right, living in this moment with the rest of the world set aside as we live together right now. It's a place that we we can only enter on our knees, like a supplicant or a person at prayer. And, indeed, it is a sacred place, one in which we trust and where we are trusted, where we are of service are where we are served, where give our whole selves and where their whole selves are given to us.

Sadly, the rest of the world will not stay in the background forever. We can keep it at bay only as long as we remain focused on the children, these humans who live unaware of the worry and guilt that are the twin plagues of life outside this bubble in which emotions are not wasted on the future or the past, mythological places which we create with our own minds. The universe not a timeline, but rather an ever-emerging now. 

Children are born with this knowledge and in this they are our teachers. Those tears soaking through are shirts are the lesson: this is real, the rest is an accident of perception.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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The Future Is Theirs Anyway

Even the most bright-sided optimist has to admit that we human beings are far from figuring it all out. Yes certainly, if you look at it from just right perspective in just the right light, one can make the argument that we've managed make our collective lives in some ways better. At the same time, we often have to squint and rationalize to persuade ourselves it's so. We still fight bloody wars. People are still starving and sick. Bigotry and racism plague us. And we continue to fiddle as scientists urgently warn us that the earth is headed toward environmental disaster. Sure, you can say, "I'm not doing those things, but it's hard to argue that we aren't.

We educate our children. Many of us are choosing to do so in ways that differ from the way we were educated, but collectively we still rely on compulsory schooling, which has changed in many superficial ways, but fundamentally operates the ways schools have since there have been schools. We say that we educate children to prepare them for life, so that they can take their place in the project of making a better future for themselves and those around them. We arrogantly insist that we adults, people who have clearly not figured it all out, have the right, even the obligation, to tell the children what and how they should learn toward this end. We hope to prepare them to do better than the collective us, yet we send them daily to places where they are expected to do as they are told, learn what they are assigned, and jump through the hoops that are placed before them. The theory is that that this will somehow cause our children to be prepared for a future that none of us have figured out.

And as we self-righteously prepare our children for life, they are busy living it.

This is a great tragedy of not just modern childhood, but of humanity. We've doubled-down on schooling just as we need new ways of thinking, of doing, of seeing the world. We do not need more people thinking like the generations before them. We do not need more of the same. Those of us who work with young children spend our days around the greatest minds ever known. Those of us who refuse to tell them what and how to learn, who choose rather to create places where they can actually live their lives, rather than merely preparing for some theoretical future, tend to stand in awe. We cannot be among these fully formed human beings without becoming at least somewhat hopeful for the future, even as we know that most of them are destined for years of being "prepared," a process explicitly designed to shape them as replicas of what has come before rather than help them achieve their highest potential, which is as a free-thinking, free-doing, free-living human.

As the great John Dewey wrote over a decade ago, "Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself." We will, of course, never figure it all out, but doing the same thing over and over is certainly not the path forward. We need to stop this insane project of preparing our children and instead let them live. The future is theirs anyway.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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Thank You, Jasper, For Teaching Me And For Being My Friend

Last night I attended the memorial for Jasper "Jazzy" Echo Toms. It would have been his 17th birthday. 

My friend Peter, his father, said, "This was not part of the plan." I cannot imagine the pain his family must be suffering. Parents are not meant to outlive their children. My friend Laura, his mother, asked us to keep him alive by telling our stories of him.

I first met Japer when I was his sister Zsa Zsa's teacher. He was a bump in Laura's belly. His family came to Woodland Park to change my life, introducing me to the intentional practice of creating community through art. That picture at the top of this blog is of me playing with Jasper's family on a summer solstice when he was still my student.

I don't usually use the word "cute" to describe children, but that two-year-old Jasper, with his chubby cheeks on top of a 100 watt smile was the definition of cute. He was a boy who tried everything, but seemed mostly interested in people, both his fellow classmates and their parents. He loved to talk, to ask questions, to explain. Even in the midst of classroom chaos, I would find him engaged in conversation, looking people in the eye, his eyebrows lowered in concentration as if really trying to understand.

As he grew to be three and four-years-old, he was everyone's friend, playing with girls and boys alike, never isolating himself in one group or game for too long. It was as if he knew there was always something or someone else amazing for him to experience. At any given moment you could find him, never alone, always talking, building with blocks, pretending in a costume, squishing the play dough, or holding court at the snack table.

There was one type of play that seemed to genuinely concern him, however. He didn't care for play that involved weaponry or fighting. It didn't frighten him as much as confuse him. Should a sword fight break out he would stand off to the side, watching, clearly trying to comprehend what he was seeing. He may have gamely tried to join in once or twice, like a scientist trying to figure something out, but always stepped away after a minute or two, not sure how to take part in this energy without engaging in what he evidently viewed as unsavory behavior. These were his friends, he wanted to play with them, but not that game.

He always had a silly sense of humor and by the time he was five, he had figured out that this was how he could enter into the rowdy play, not as a combatant, but as a mirth-maker, the person who caused the others to lay down their weapons to join him by rolling on the floor (sometimes literally) laughing. The "joke" I remember most is the one-liner of simply saying the nonsense word, "Dodo!" In a way it was beneath him, this play for cheap laughs: he was an articulate, thoughtful boy and I recall almost feeling sorry for him, but he had discovered the power of lowest-common-denominator humor. Before long "Dodo" was the punchline to every classroom joke, a guaranteed laugh line, one that got funnier and funnier as the year went on. When the five-year-olds decided to write and perform an original play, Jasper chose to be a character called "Dodo," a silly jester type who was in every scene.

I learned last night from his high school classmates that he was a boy who would not be defined by social status or type, that he was a "social butterfly," a boy at home in every "friend group," be it the popular kids, the band geeks, or the debate team. I couldn't help but reflect on him as a preschooler, even then a part of every group, and when he came across one he didn't understand, he studied, then found his way into the rowdy play group without compromising one bit on his innate sense of right and wrong.

I often saw Jasper outside of school as well. One evening, we were both at a fundraiser for the Fremont Arts Council. Various artists had created art from umbrellas and it was being auctioned off. I had made a donation at the door and so hadn't intended to bid. Jasper crawled into my lap and told me he thought we should get the "dog umbrella for the school," a piece made my the artist Sarah Lovett. It was a dog fashioned from plastic mesh atop a Whinny the Pooh umbrella and filled with battery powered LED lights. It was a perfect addition to our classroom where it hung from our ceiling for years.

I saw Jasper less and less as he got older, the typical pattern of relationships preschool teachers have with their students, although we did periodically cross paths. One summer day, I found myself alone with 12-year-old Zsa Zsa and 9-year-old Jasper. Zsa Zsa had just entered middle school and had discovered one of the great truths about modern education. She went on a rant about the "total irrelevancy" of what she was expected to be learning. She would "never use it in real life." And there was Jasper, years ahead of his time, backing his sister up, providing examples from elementary school to prove the point. When I shared this memory with Zsa Zsa a couple days ago as we were sitting shiva she told me with a laugh, "We always shared a lot of joint outrage at the world."

It's not right that parents should outlive their children. As Peter said, the world is now dimmer. Jasper had grown into a fine young man, a man who had, even as a 16-year-old, already touched so many lives. But Laura is right, he will never truly be gone so long as the rest of us keep him alive through our stories, our memories, and the deeds we do on his behalf. Thank you, Jasper Echo Toms, for teaching me and for being my friend.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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