Experiencing play as an antidote to fear

I'm a believer in coincidence having nothing to do with coincidence.  So the other evening, watching a loon family chugging across the pond, I took note of the fact I expected an adult loon to dive with the baby. 

I was practicing a doubly dangerous form of anthropomorphic thinking: first, I was indeed assigning human instinct and emotion to birds, and second my "parental" instinct was largely incorrect.

I laughed at myself almost immediately, because—as "coincidence" would have it—I am in the midst of reading Barbara Brown Taylor's excellent new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark (http://harperone.hc.com/barbarabrowntaylor) and also drafting an article about the work of Angela Hanscom, an occupational therapist with a really good idea (http://www.balancedandbarefoot.com/about-angela).

Both of these women are addressing fear.  Ms. Brown is tackling the existential darkness and how to deal with it when it comes.  Ms. Hanscom is suggesting a means for dealing with early inklings of that larger darkness in children: falling, injury, and how that fear can keep a kid from developing in many and unexpected ways.

Perhaps where they meet is in parents.  An excellent and brilliant friend once told me—before I had children or even thought about it—that he would not have children because of the enormity of the emotional burden and risk.  Today I admire how insightful he was, without precise experience!
Fear of something happening to one's child becomes the number one fear in a parent's life.  And we all know how best to deal with that fear: Cage them!  Pad the cage.  Stay right beside it.

While we all know that this is not the right or possible approach, parents often fail to understand how they do cage their children with their words and actions.  It happens in a thousand little ways, from restricting their play ("Don't fall down!"  "Get down from there!"  "Dont...!") to instilling our own fears into them by corralling them, subtly letting them know that the world is a scary place, thus making it a scary place.  (A great source of information about this subject is Peter Gray’s blog, Freedom to Learn [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn].)

So the loon: I would have dived with my chick because it's dark and dangerous down there under the water.  But the loon knows, instinctively, that the chick has to learn to dive by itself.  And I am forgetting, in that moment when I walk my child to the bus stop or the neighborhood store that children need to learn independence—or grow up dependent and fearful.  I need to let my child fall down so that she'll learn what that's like and not fear it.  I need to let him climb that tree so that he can figure out if he's afraid of heights, if climbing things is fun.  And, in falling and climbing and swimming and running and jumping and hanging and spinning, my children learned not to fear those things and the feelings that came with them.

So they learn to deal with little fears and darknesses, which will help them deal, we hope, with bigger ones later on.  Ms. Brown's thesis is, in part, that it is by experiencing darkness in its various forms that we come to some comfort with it and so are able learn from it.

Ms. Hanscom, meanwhile, also knows that without being allowed to indulge in the risk-taking behavior to which children seem naturally drawn, serious developmental issues can result.  Without falling, spinning, tumbling, and rolling, a child's brain—in particular, the vestibular system—will not be able to cope with stimuli later on.  The result can be anything from clumsiness to an inability to read.

As parents, then, we are doubly challenged.  We have to find a balance between allowing our children to play and protecting them from real hazards, while at the same time living with and coming to terms with our own fears of loss.  In sitting with those fears and allowing our children the freedoms they need, we are parenting them and ourselves.

Bee Stings and Other Irritants

I got stung by a bee this morning.  Twice.  It had been a long time since I'd been stung, so at first I didn't know what had happened, thinking I had something scratchy in my bathing suit. 

But what became apparent fairly quickly was that I had a bee in my bathing suit.  What the little bugger was doing in there, I have no idea.  I apparently freed him from his distress while I was trying to determine what was in there and saw him walking across the right thigh of the suit.

And I smacked him (or her) dead, instinctively.  It was an instinctive over reaction on my part, resulting in the unnecessary demise of the bee. 

No big deal.  Plenty more where that came from.  Nothing he didn't deserve—after all, he stung me twice!  And what was he doing in my bathing suit, anyway?  Stupid bee.

Pretty standard.  And a lot of the time, my instinctive reactions are pretty standard—because they are instinctive!  We share these instincts, these standard reactions and their very commonness is what makes them seem okay.  And for the most part, as these reactions also stay within certain standard boundaries, they are okay  Bee stings, swat bee, bee dies.  Move on.

But this morning, I've got the time for some reflection.  The bee's motive was survival.  Even without any anthropomorphising, it's not hard to understand that.  It found itself caught in a strange place with something large and warm and moving and its choice to defend itself was instinctive.  We both reacted from the same place of fear—and his was far more understandable than mine.  I could have brushed him off my suit.

How often are my instinctive reactions within standard, acceptable boundaries, but also unnecessary and possibly hurtful?  I can think of times when, as a parent of young children, a lack of emotional elasticity brought on by fatigue or some stressor the children couldn't possibly comprehend, resulted in an overreaction to children being children, e.g., noisy, really, really inquisitive, engaging in risky behavior, and so on.

Today, my overreactions are much more likely to be internal than overt.  I read or hear something that rankles me and I get "bent out of shape" and have conversations with people who are not present and indulge in some thinking about what I'd do if I could....  Cop a resentment or, as I've heard it put, cogently, take poison and wait for somebody else to die.

Fork over my peace of mind, in other words.  I can do this pretty much anywhere at any time.  But, increasingly, when it comes to the behaviors of members of my own species, I try to remember to wonder why that person did, said, or thought that.  Maybe it's a momentary lack of emotional elasticity.  Maybe he or she just got stung by a bee.

My side, your side

My side, your side

Attention, oncoming vehicles:  If there is a car or truck parked on your side of the street, or a bicyclist, perhaps, occupying part of your travel lane, that does not constitute reason enough for you to cross the double yellow and assume part of my travel lane, forcing me across the white "fog" line and onto the (perhaps nonexistent) shoulder.

Nope.  You, dear other driver in the oncoming vehicle, are supposed to slow down or, God forbid, stop and wait until there is free space in my travel lane before proceeding.  Got it?  I know, it's hard to imagine that my safety and whatever it is I have to do in my shabby little life might actually take precedence over the utter urgency and importance of everything about you, but get over it. 

And while we're here, let's talk about YIELD.  Yield: give way, surrender, back down. 

This is clearly NOT the American way, especially on our roadways.  But I'm sorry, if I happen to be silly enough to going anything close to the speed limit and consequently driving in the right-hand lane of a multi-lane highway (particularly an Interstate, a designation apparently allowing those drivers in the other one, two or three lanes to have increased their speed exponentially since the last state border), I am unlikely to be able to move over for you and if I slow down, some semi is going to move my spare tire in to my back seat.

So yield, for God's sake.  What's it gonna cost you?  15 seconds?

And there in, of course, lies the rub.  You don't have 15 seconds in your tragically busy life.  You're so frantic and overwhelmed and out of time that if you don't keep moving your head's going to explode.

The problem on the roads isn't on the roads.  It starts way before that.  The problem, dear other driver, is so deep and labyrinthine and dark and gooey that I'm not going there.  How do I know?  Whahahahahaha!

You know what I mean.