I recently began volunteering at a pre-school in Berkeley. On Tuesday I had a realization that my calling is to be a pre-school teacher. Today I was riding on the SF BART train when I began writing. Though at first I faced a very uncooperative writing utensil, I managed to get a start. By the time I reached Berkeley, I was so into what I was writing that I raced to the library, desperately found a bathroom, and sat and wrote like a madman, like I was a leaky vessel and someone was pouring water into me and I was just leaking all over the page. By the time I was done, I realized what I had written was a declaration of why I want to be a pre-school teacher.
Thinking about “allowing” related to children and then adults
As we grow and form our values and fears, we essentially take the stance that certain things are allowed, and others are not. Often we use the language of “should” to express this allowance and disallowance. “I should be this way.” “I shouldn’t think or feel this.”
Here are my questions: why do we do this? Does it work? And how does it make us feel?
Why we do this
When we’re kids, we are told explicitly and implicitly by parents, friends, media, musical, cultural and religious influences how we should feel, think, act, what is better and worse, what we can and can’t do. Basically, what is allowed.
Rarely are these phrased to us as ideas, or developing processes, as one possible way to do things. Instead, they are the way. We learn one language and one accent, and that is how to speak. We learn one way to treat sickness, and that is the correct, the only, way.
So we learn absolutes. Right. Wrong. What is allowed.
And unless we happen to travel, live with diversity, be exposed to open-minded people, we often don’t find out there are other ways, other viewpoints, other possibilities. Other right ways.
So if we don’t fit into this system of what is allowed, if even part of us doesn’t fit, two unfortunate things tend to happen. One, we rebel against what isn’t allowed, which can sometimes be excellent. Rebellion is what the civil rights movements, Gandhi’s salt marches, were. But in rebelling, we so often lose ourselves, angrily lashing out at what we perceive as oppressing us, filling ourselves with sadness or rage, losing sight of the original purpose to express ourselves. We end up hating. We conform by anti-conforming.
Or, option two; we go along with the system, burying that part of ourselves that doesn’t fit. But this takes such a terrible toll to hide it, it produces such a shame and closing up and distance. Just think about something you don’t like about yourself. How does it make you feel when you try to not be that way, not feel that way, when you try to fit into what you’re supposed to do and feel and be?
Alright, so we have this system, basically what is allowed and what isn’t. Before I go more into if the system has its own merits, let’s look at if it works.
What does it mean to “work?” Is our goal as a people, society or world to get people to be and do and act a certain way? If this is our goal (I will soon address how short this goal falls), then still it doesn’t work.
Take young kids. If we tell a kid not to cross a line, and he doesn’t understand why, or disagrees, here’s what happens. If he consents, maybe out of fear, or for a reward, or because he lacks the confidence to question authority or express what he believes, then you have begun to create a child who does things out of fear, or out of incentive, or due to lacking confidence.
And if he refuses? Often, especially because of how young he is, and because of the adult’s reaction to this disobedience, so much is lost. We lose his reasons for disobeying, we lose his courage to face authority and express what he believes. What could have been an empowering situation, what could have turned into a conversation about values and differences and understanding turns into an unconscious power struggle.
Here’s a crazy idea I just had. What if, as adults, we’re sometimes just plain wrong? What if we tell a kid not to cross a line, but that’s actually the right thing for him? Can we at least admit we might, sometimes, maybe, be partially wrong? That there are upwards of 6 billion human beings on this planet and there might be 6 billion right ways to do something? That throughout history knowledge and beliefs have constantly changed? That the only constant is that people almost always believe that their way is right? Leeches were once the right way, said Western science, to cure sicknesses. We laugh at this today but at one time this was right, according to them. Do you think they’d listen if you went back and told them they were wrong?
So how does all this allowing and disallowing make us feel?
Well, if our goal, as I suggest it at least partially should be, is to raise empowered, happy, safe children, then most certainly allowing/not allowing does not work, even if it does get people to fearfully or ignorantly comply. Because when the child agrees not to cross the line without knowing why, when he sees the adult doesn’t care to include him in the knowledge and process, or if perhaps the child wants to cross the line but is too scared to speak up, a whole paradigm is set into place: control. Disempowerment. Only allowing certain party of yourself. And excuse my language, but how the hell can we leave certain parts out? How can we not let ourselves be whole?
Back to adults. So when we’re adults, we internalize all of this “allowance” and “disallowance,” unconsciously. We are at times angry or sad or apathetic and we don’t know why. What we have inside is an army of “shoulds,” of allowed and not allowed. I am right. You are wrong. This part of me is right. This part of me is wrong. We feel all this pressure, because ourselves, our friends, our religion, or maybe just aliens from outer space, said so.
Our thoughts and emotions all come with positive and negative values. “I like girls.” I can think this. Good. Positive. “I like boys.” I can’t think this. Society and religion says it’s bad. Negative. And the negative thoughts come with a whole negative story attached. “I am sad. It’s bad to be sad.” Now we feel worse. We’ve created a whole story, an endless chain of thoughts, to go along with our “negative feeling.” We don’t understand this and now we feel out of control. Disempowered.
Would it be possible to live like we’re partly still kids, like we’re still learning, like we don’t know it all, like maybe we learned some things in a way that doesn’t suit us as well? When we’re kids we can say we don’t know. What makes us think we know any more when we’re older? Isn’t it possible we just know different things, that the kids know some stuff the adults forgot and they can teach us just like we can teach them?
So what happens when we embrace, when we allow? I see it on the faces of the kids all the time, the boundless, radiant joy, the most joyous smile you’ve ever seen. Something special, pure, beautiful. Something that melts your heart. Something that will change you. Something that will change the world.
It would be against the spirit of this to say I know all this I’ve said is right. I don’t. I don’t, and that, to me, is a beautiful thing. Can we find the joy in the process, not just the product? In the journey, not just the destination? Can we find the blessing in change, in not knowing?
A year ago I didn’t know or believe most of this. Perhaps a year from now I’ll believe different things. What I do know is that writing this has been fun as hell, that the process of growing and testing my knowledge and beliefs, of allowing, is incredible.
And you might believe something totally different. Good. Good. Can we come together and create a loving space where we allow for each other, for each other’s beliefs, for every part of ourselves? I wouldn’t want to live any way but whole. Would you?
And that, in the end, is why I want to be a preschool teacher. Or perhaps I should say, why I want to be in preschool. Because I’m not sure whether it’s me or the kids who are doing the teaching. Sometimes I have this crazy idea it’s both of us. At the exact time.
