Yesterday, I held a boy as he cried. I had to extend my arms to reach around him; he is no longer the little child who laced his arms around my neck as I rocked him on my hip, or the small boy who crawled into my lap in search of comfort. He doesn’t call me ‘Nana’ anymore - I have graduated to ‘Nan’ - and although I know he still loves me dearly, I also know that, like any teenager, it strains his patience when he has to explain his beloved tech to me… again. He is smart and articulate and, at times, surprisingly wise, and he cackles with delight when he cracks a pun. 

And yet there he was, pressed against me as he sobbed the awkward, wrenching tears of an adolescent, his heart breaking with the hurt that has held him hostage since he first became aware of himself. Since he first became aware that, through no fault of his own, he was born into a society that rubs and chafes him like an ill-fitting shoe. A society that asserts that the solution to his discomfort is to insist that if he just walks far and long enough in that shoe, it will eventually fit him just fine - and then criticizes him for limping or punishes him for refusing to walk any further. Instead of just helping him find a shoe that fits. 

He has so much potential, yet it is locked away, hidden behind the relentless daily struggle to conform to a standard that measures him by his struggles and ignores his strengths. And yes, many may sincerely believe that they are helping by continually pointing out where he falls short of society’s expectations. and pushing him to try harder. They just want to help him do better, to be better. But is it better when the price is pain and shame?

Especially when the result is a broken boy in my arms, sobbing: “I wish everyone didn't keep trying to help me be better. It's just too hard." And then whispering: "Sometimes I think it would be easier to be dead.”

The power of process

Recently, my son posted on our family Whatsapp group a photo of my five-year-old granddaughter, Bethany, that had been sent to them by her teacher. She is enveloped from head to pink wellington-booted toe in a bright (you guessed it) pink rain-suit, and is focusing intently on sawing through a branch clamped in a bench vise.

This is not a particularly unusual activity at Beth’s school – she attends a Forest Kindergarten in Munich, Germany – where the children learn through guided play in nature. Instead of a functional educational space equipped with modern resources, Beth’s school ‘building’ comprises two fairly rustic-looking caravans, a couple of very large umbrellas, and (I have it on excellent authority, as my son was instrumental in digging them) compost loos. What it does offer is direct access to a natural wonderland, where the children can explore and expand their minds, following wherever their curiosity leads them and letting their imaginations roam free.  It’s often wet and muddy. In winter, it snows. There are no plastic toys. Or tech. And Beth loves it.

On returning home from the forest that day, Beth chattered about her woodwork all afternoon. The following day promised yet another wet day in the woods - all that lush green foliage doesn’t just happen - and with the only available shelter being the large umbrellas, she was offered the choice of staying home. She declined on the grounds that she had some unfinished business with her little saw.

Beth is unlikely to become a career lumberjack. But even if she never touches a saw again, she learned some valuable lessons from the hours she devoted to her woodwork project. On a practical level, she had to work out at which point along the branch she needed to tighten the clamp so that the wood would remain horizontal while she sawed through it. Mathematicians or physicists would doubtless be able to express this principle in an elegant equation, but Beth had to work it out by trial and error. Then, she had to master the movement of drawing the blade of the saw back and forth across the branch, smoothly and in the same groove but with enough force to cut through the wood. This takes patience and perseverance, as I discovered during my own childhood forays into my father’s workshop – a valuable lesson that I failed to learn at that stage! Beth, however, stuck with her self-appointed task for the better part of two school days, demonstrating a considerable degree of determination. In the pouring rain.

I don’t know what happened to the offcuts of the branch that Beth sawed through. Maybe they were picked up and used for a craft project. Maybe they formed the walls of a custom-made snail house (one of Beth’s earlier favoured activities). Maybe they were used for kindling on a really cold day. I am sure they will not have been wasted – it is a Forest Kindergarten, after all!  But it was not the product of Beth’s labours that got me thinking; it was the process.

The photo of my little granddaughter in her bright pink rain suit captured her in the process of sawing. She enjoyed the experience of sawing. She was more interested in the act of sawing than in the pile of offcuts that was the product of her woodwork. And she learned from that process.

As educators, I believe we tend to focus too much on the product of learning rather than on the process. This is largely driven by the requirement to assess our students quantitatively, as process – the ‘how’ we do something – is qualitative and far harder to pigeonhole than the result, or product, of that process.  

The thing is, modern education is a mass-production event and, while it is unarguably wonderful that more children than ever before have access to education, the ideal of children learning at their own pace, led by their individual interests and abilities is, well, idealistic. Or very elitist. By the time most young people reach their middle teens, school has become a kind of educational sorting house, where the students are ranked almost exclusively on their results – the product of their performance rather than the process. Those rankings determine the level of tertiary training they can access, direct their career choices, and – sadly – often shape how successful they perceive their lives to be. The fact that the further they progress along the path of tertiary education, the more important process becomes, leaving many students floundering in deep waters, merely serves to underscore the shortcomings of this system.

The (unpopular) truth is that while we all have equal intrinsic value, not everyone is born with the same aptitudes and abilities. And in an educational system that prioritizes worth based on results, too many students give up on the learning process. When their efforts do not rank them among the high achievers, they lose confidence and motivation and abandon the process, missing out on lessons that would benefit them in whatever line of work, or life, they pursue. 

In a world where we are educating children for a future we can only imagine, we should surely be focusing on the process of learning - on encouraging curiosity and creativity, and developing perseverance through failing forward – rather than on accumulating a record of results. I have no idea what the little pink-clad girl in the photo will do when she grows up, but I know that she will do it all the better for having been encouraged to pursue her curiosity and persevere in learning new skills - no matter how inclement the conditions!

                                        

 

Be kind

 On Monday morning, as I drove home after dropping my grandson at his new school, I - unusually for me - had the car radio turned on. I don’t know which station it was tuned to and I was not really listening; my thoughts were already making quite enough noise in my head. But as I turned into my driveway, I found myself focusing on the words of a young woman as she animatedly described how stressful her morning had been, owing to the fact that she had had to spend 20 minutes searching for her cell phone.

I smiled wryly. I had spent the past two hours in my car outside a local remedial school, locked in what felt like mortal combat with a nine-year-old autistic boy as he lashed out in the frenzy of a panic-induced meltdown. I was bruised and bleeding, but it was my heart that ached at having had to leave him, sobbing and exhausted, at the stairway to his classroom. 

I would happily have traded for a misplaced cell phone. 

But then I got to thinking...

What right had I to dismiss someone else’s version of a bad morning as trivial? What did I know about that young woman’s life? And even if a missing cell phone was the nadir in her notion of hardship, who was I to claim superiority in the stress stakes? I was safely back home, while Sammy still had to battle his way through the day at school. Sammy could look forward to home -time, when I would meet him at the school gates with a huge hug and the promise of a big plate of extra-crispy chips when we got home. But for countless children, there is no certainty of anything to eat, let alone French fries, when they get home... and for others, home is not a safe space. And for far too many, in this time of Covid, there are empty spaces at home where loved  ones used to live.

Everyone has a story, and none of us has the right to design a scale of suffering to weigh other people’s experiences against our own - especially if our aim is to earn more pity points. A brief survey of social media threads reveals how ruthless people can be in judging others’ situations and assigning blame and shame without knowing all the facts, or making misery a competition, with the ‘winner’ getting some sort of sad satisfaction from feeling they got the worst deal in life. Even in this we are quick to criticise those who play the pain game publicly, while all too often participating in the silence of our thoughts. I know I did on Monday. Just for a brief moment, but long enough that I felt ashamed. 

Life is a precarious balance between pain and pleasure, trial and triumph, and we can’t always choose which side of the coin lands upwards.

But we can choose to be kind. To each other, and to ourselves. And in that choice we can both offer and receive solace for the pain, and strength for the trial. 

It’s the very least we can do.

It’s the very best we can do. 

Going green on the inside

Thursday mornings are rubbish collection days in our neighbourhood and, while I confess that I don't exactly relish the task of tottering out to the pavement weighed down by black refuse bags that threaten to disgorge their less-than-fragrant contents at any moment all over my slippered feet, I am always conscious of gratitude that we live in an area where refuse removal is a regular service. The volume of waste one household can generate in a week is quite astonishing - almost as astonishing as the number of energetically-wriggling maggots that can hatch in that same time.

South Africans are (in the global context) rather late to the recycling party but progress has been made. Of course what precisely happens to all our carefully-separated items in their colour-coded bags after their ride on the municipal dump truck is somewhat unclear but it's a start, if only in educating the average householder to sort and separate. 

My son and his family live in Munich, where recycling is so entrenched that kitchen bins come with four compartments to facilitate the process. Paper is separated from hard plastic, while discarded food is saved for composting... and woe betide the recalcitrant resident who disposes of coloured glass in the same recycling bin as clear glass! It is a discipline that visitors have to learn (the threat of re-sorting the rubbish is a persuasive teacher) but I did notice that I soon became more mindful of waste in general. And that got me thinking...

There are several useful life lessons to be learned from our relationship with refuse. Archaeologists know that much can be deduced about a past civilization from a careful scrutiny of its middens. Anyone rooting through our household rubbish would not have to be Sherlock Holmes to conclude that someone consumes an inordinate quantity of yoghurt. Specifically, smooth yoghurt in ridiculously small tubs, in apparent disregard of the obvious economies of scale that would apply if we were to buy that same yoghurt in large tubs. This inquisitive person would not necessarily discern that our family includes a small boy on the autism spectrum with restrictive eating habits but I have no doubt that he (or she) would draw conclusions of some sort. What we throw away reveals something about us, from our culinary tastes and retail preferences to our economic well-being. And, of course, how 'green' we really are.

And then there is the 'rubbish' that litters our inner landscape. Some of it is the unavoidable detritus that accumulates from daily life, easily discarded and soon forgotten. But many of us have internal rubbish dumps that have not been cleared for far too long, with the result that our emotional environment is far from healthy. Part of that pile of rotting refuse might be the result of abuse and hurts that were dumped on you without your permission, while some may be anger and resentment you have chosen to hoard. Often we inherit rubbish from our parents, along with the feeling that we cannot dump what has defined our family for so long. Whatever its origin, the fact is that, like our physical rubbish, if we refuse to deal with our refuse, we will eventually be overcome by its toxic presence.

And this is where recycling comes in. As I observed earlier in this rather rambling rumination, sorting through your rubbish encourages mindfulness. And, just as when you are separating paper from plastic and cans from glass bottles, you need to pay attention to the internal rubbish you are sorting though. When it comes to our emotional refuse, there is some rubbish that should be swiftly scooped up and cast out, as far away from us as possible before it can poison our lives any further with feelings of failure and undeserved shame.  But then there are those difficult experiences that we have buried in our minds' middens which need to be exhumed and re-examined for the valuable lessons that can be learned from them. This type of rubbish makes valuable compost for personal growth and to merely discard it would be wasteful indeed.  

'Going green' is a lifestyle choice to develop a habit of dealing with the stuff of daily living in such a way as to cause as little harm as possible to the environment. The same principles apply to dealing with the daily stuff of our emotional  lives. It takes courage and discipline but with practice we can all develop the healthy habit of sorting, recycling and cleaning out our internal rubbish on a regular basis, leaving our inner landscapes as maggot-free and fragrant as the bins outside our kitchen doors.

And we don't even have to pay rates to do it!

Besting your PB is being the best

En route to school today, a little voice from the backseat informed me that Sammy had diverged from his usual early morning (he wakes up any time from 4.45 am onwards) iPad viewing of ‘all things wheeled’ and elected to watch Youtube clips of people running – “to help me get ready for sports day, Nana.”

Now those of you who are patient enough to follow my rather random ramblings might remember my post about Sammy’s sports day last year, when his performance may not have been an unmitigated success in terms of results but was an award-winning example of courage and perseverance. [http://wackyjacci.blogspot.co.za/2016/09/from-my-small-corner-when-courage-is.html]

With this year’s preeminent sporting event just a week away, training at 35 Lansdowne is at an all-time high. We run countless laps – the track has been extended to include the back garden this year – and weave our way through a complicated course of brightly-coloured cones, always taking care to avoid the inconveniently-placed sink hole in the middle of the front lawn. After all, it IS an obstacle race. My running style was sharply critiqued (“lift your KNEES, Nana!”) as I shuffled around the track after a long day at work last week and even my 81-year-old mother was put through her paces one afternoon. If preparation and passion were accurate predictors of success, Sam would have that podium finish in the bag.

And there’s the rub. As hard as one tries and as desperately as one wants it, there ARE no guarantees of winning – well, in a free and fair race, that is! And the interesting thing is that premier performers get that. I may have mentioned before that I am an avid arm-chair athletics enthusiast. I can appreciate the immense skill that goes into mastering ball-games such as tennis but to me, honing one’s body into a precision tool that obeys the will beyond physical boundaries is an almost-mystical feat and a thing of beauty to watch. And having watched for a number of years, I have been struck by how realistic most competitors are. Of course they aim to win – that ambition fuels the endless, gruelling hours of training - but those athletes know to the split second what their personal best is and it is really that which they are targeting as they thunder down the track towards the finish line. And so it is possible to finish fourth and be elated because you beat your PB… which is sort of what I tried to explain to young Samuel as we approached Livingstone Road.  But I think he had moved on and was practising counting to 100. Ah well. We still have just under a week to go, during which time I can only hope that this message will drop from his head into his heart. Or maybe past his ears and into his head. Realistic, that’s me.

But all that got me thinking. From our first breath we are either being compared to, or comparing ourselves with, the other competitors in the race of life. And somehow we have all bought into the ‘winner takes all, second is just first loser’ mindset that, ultimately, makes losers of us all. What if we embraced a whole new paradigm based on beating one’s personal best, rather than everyone else? What if we celebrated the achievement of every child who exceeds his own expectations and breaks his own record? It may be an unpopular truth but it is true nonetheless that we are not all born with the same measure of talent or given the same amount of opportunity. And the veracity of the popular mantra ‘if you can dream it, you can achieve it’ is, at best, questionable.  But we CAN be better than we were last season… last month…last week…yesterday. 

Let’s get real and reward realistically and equitably: to beat your PB IS the victory.  

Whose voice do you listen to?

I was playing with my grandchildren the other day, busily constructing Duplo accommodation for Lily’s animals and Sammy’s cars, when Sam held up the building he had just finished and announced in a gloomy tone worthy of Eeyore, “I’ve built this but Lily will laugh and say it is not good.”

Actually, it WAS good - particularly in view of Sammy’s proprioceptive challenges – which made his statement all the more troubling. Because what it showed me was that not only does Sammy hear his younger sister’s critical commentary, but that hers is the voice that he is listening to. And while we make every attempt to curb little Lily’s (unfortunately usually truthful, if somewhat unkind) observations about her brother’s efforts, we also ensure that our encouraging words of praise for persistence and progress outweigh hers in both number and noise. So why does he listen more to her occasional criticism than to our constant stream of affirmation?

And Sammy is not alone in this. While there are those blithe souls who appear to have bottomless wells of self-confidence (although I am sure even they have seasons of insecurity), most of us tend to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to negative input. Worse still, we allow it to shape how we see ourselves, which in time can lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy of under-performance.

I am not suggesting that all comparison is harmful or that we should expect our every effort to be applauded indiscriminately – that road leads to the demise of excellence and the rule of mediocrity. I am suggesting that we need to learn to be more discerning about whose voices we allow the most airtime in our heads. Of course, that requires us to have the innate confidence in our own worth to judge the validity of others’ evaluation of us and to turn a deaf ear to those voices that we decide are not speaking truth. Which is well-nigh impossible to achieve if we are relying on those same external voices to construct our self-worth and indeed, our identity.

I believe that we are tuning in to the wrong channel. Society sings the praises of sensational celebrities and conspicuous consumerism, promoting style over substance and charisma over character. And if one’s image is constantly under construction, how can one expect to build a solid identity? In a world addicted to overnight success stories, the winner takes it all…until he or she falls, to be trampled underfoot by the erstwhile adoring fans who take just as much delight in their idols’ demise as they did in their rise. The siren voices on this channel tell you that if you can dream it, you can be it – and then laugh raucously when you fail.

But there is another channel. It is sometimes hard to hear over the static but if you train your ear to listen, you will hear quiet, reassuring voices that tell you that you are worthwhile because of who you are, regardless of what you can do. That it doesn’t matter how many times you fall as long as you pick yourself up one more time and keep going. That determination and hard work are the foundation of lasting success. That integrity is the cement that holds your identity together. And that it is the kindness you show to those around you that makes your memory linger in their hearts, not how witty or wealthy you were.

And so our challenge is not only to help our children hear the right voices, but also to teach them to speak in them.

And where better to begin than with ourselves?

Moving from awareness to understanding - one giant step for me.

It seems that every month comes with at least one ‘awareness’ tag and one of the causes that is highlighted in April is Autism Awareness. With a view to raising autism awareness in Durban, local organisation Breakthrough Inventions (SA) organised its inaugural ‘The Blue and You Autism Run’ for Saturday 29^th April. Prospective entrants were thoughtfully offered the option of a 5km run/walk or a 10km run, but when the son-in-law (and father of our Sammy) succumbed to a rush of blood to the head and signed up for the 10km event, pride prevented one (being me) from doing any less ‘for the cause’. Ho hum. Contritionem praecedit superbia and all that.

Now, I used to run. Quite respectably, if I may say so. And while I never posed a threat to any speed or distance records, I wore out my share of running shoes on the tarmac. But the combination of a childhood spent in the ballet studio in the earnest pursuit of beautiful duck-feet and some twenty years of pounding pavements concentrating on leaving strictly parallel footprints took an inevitable toll on my hips and knees, with the result that while there may have been the odd sighting of me on the hoof in recent years, it has been observed – unkindly if accurately - that hippos wade through dense water hyacinth faster than I move, even when I am hitting the high notes on my Fitbit heart monitor. It might also be worth mentioning that I have embraced a whole new decade since I last ran a 10km event. 

However, I am nothing if not optimistic so I set about escalating my fitness programme from the occasional gentle 5km shuffle along the uMhlanga promenade to (fairly) frequent forays to the Palace of Active Virgins, where I could be found burning rubber on the treadmill for (relatively) prolonged periods.  The results were noteworthy. My Discovery points soared, as did the bank balance of my friendly physiotherapist. My fitness increased in direct proportion to the discomfort in my left knee…and hip… but hey, I grew up chanting ‘Go for the burn’ with Jane Fonda so I pressed on regardless. Qui non dolet non vincit or, to put it a tad more snappily, nil doloris, nil majoris.

A day or so before the Big Event, I limped off to the physio and emerged looking like King Tut’s mummy, my left leg encased in eye-wateringly purple spider tape. Okay, so I chose the colour but what can I say? Go big or go home. Anyway, I was as good to go as I would ever be.

Saturday 29^th dawned all good and clean and fresh but the tra la la was distinctly lacking in at least one of our party. I mean, the spirit was champing enthusiastically at the bit but the flesh was definitely dragging its heels. Particularly the left one. We arrived at the start with time to spare – enough time, it transpired, for the Other Half, who was present in his official role of chauffeur and cheerleader (and unofficial role of amateur paramedic), to fall prey to a fierce attack of FOMO that moved him to sign up to run the full distance in his civvies.  He was heard murmuring (more than once) about the inherent handicap of wearing heavy cargo shorts but the son-in-law and I, enveloped from neck to navel in exuberantly blue-and-orange sponsored race T-shirts that stridently promoted awareness of us, if not of autism, to all but the profoundly visually-challenged, turned a resolutely deaf ear.

The gun went pop and the modest field of 10km trotters set off towards Blue Lagoon, where we were to double back and pound along the Promenade past Sun Coast casino and beyond before turning back towards the start, at the home of the Natal Mounted Rifles. The course was flat and the going should have been easy – other than having to navigate the happy hordes of Park Runners whose awareness of our cause definitely extended to our water tables, upon which they came down like the legendary Assyrian. Before long the Other Half was just a dim silhouette in the distance, distinguishable only by his cargo shorts billowing bravely in the breeze as he dashed to cross the finish line first.  This did not surprise me but the son-in-law was also exhibiting some nifty ankle-work, which troubled me somewhat as, based on our training times, I had confidently expected to keep pace at the very least and perhaps even show him a clean pair of heels. But it was not to be. Instead, he kicked up his heels and left me trailing ignominiously in his wake.

I think I can fairly say that I have never experienced a more miserable run. Everything was wrong; the left side of my body felt weirdly disconnected from the right, with the result that I couldn’t find any rhythm in either pace or breathing. By the halfway mark, my left leg was responding sluggishly and discomfort had long since given way to outright pain. I seriously considered stopping but, apart from my celebrated strength of mind (certain ill-disposed persons have been known to call me stubborn), I was doing this for Sammy so bailing was not an option. And so it was that, as I grimly plodded along, frustration and humiliation jostling for the upper hand, I had one of those epiphany things that so many clever people claim inspired their world-changing discoveries. Like Archimedes when he was relaxing with his rubber duckies in the bath.

Perhaps my eureka moment wasn’t world-changing in the cosmic sense but it definitely changed my world because suddenly, I understood what life must be like for Sammy – not just when he is having a particularly bad day, as I was, but every day. Everything is always just that bit harder for him, from mastering physical challenges to making friends, while sensory discomfort and often-crippling anxiety are his constant companions. He often feels disconnected from the world in which he has to find his place – and giving up is not a long-term option in life’s race. No wonder he often explodes in angry frustration. No wonder he sometimes tells me that ‘God didn’t make me right’ and ‘I think I need a new brain’.

And so, while I was running to raise awareness of autism among the local population, I took a giant personal step from autism awareness towards understanding autism - and that, to quote Robert Frost, has made all the difference.