Dear Families,
Learning to See Through Walls
Altruism
What if we got outside ourselves and there
really was an outside out there, not just
our insides turned inside out? What if there
really were a you beyond me, not just
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,
though not well—just enough to know that off
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.
What if, when we said I love you, there were
a you to love as there is a yard beyond
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavy vision
of the self’s heat, love become a decision.
~Molly Peacock
When I’m asked to describe the goals of early childhood education, I always start with the idea of widening circles. We come into the world able to see just far enough to make out the face of the person caring for us, while resting in their arms. Gradually, we develop the ability to see those caring people even when they aren’t holding us, and then to understand that those people continue to exist even when we cannot see them. Slowly, we come to know and trust people outside of those most immediate relationships. When children come to school, they connect with their teachers, then their classmates, then others in their school community. And with each step their circle widens so that they are able to sustain meaningful relationships with an increasingly extended and diverse range of people and ideas.
Ultimately, the bigger picture goal of education across a lifetime is for children to become so adept at extending their understanding that they are able to approach new concepts and tasks with openness, to unpack and grapple with perspectives very different from their own with curiosity, and to think deeply about places, people, and ideas that are outside their direct experience with depth and nuance. The goal is to become increasingly capable of understanding the abstract.
A significant challenge of the isolation we are experiencing right now is the extent to which it has rapidly closed our circles. Our experience of others has been contracted, as though a cord were quickly drawn, cinching our communities back into their smallest, tightest most nuclear clusters.
One of our most important jobs, as teachers and parents, is to open our arms, our hearts, and our minds to others and to help children do the same, so that they can learn to invite an increasingly expansive and complex web of perspectives and ideas into their relationships and into their understandings. At a Reggio Emilia workshop I attended long ago, the presenter said, “Learning is coming into complexity.” And yet every aspect of our growing appreciation for complexity is harder when we can’t lay our eyes and our hands on the world and on one another.
We need contact. We evolved for it. Those infants, who can only see 8”-10,” away prefer looking at faces to looking at objects. We are driven to look at one another, and we know from an array of research that empathy is harder when we cannot see and be seen. Whether posting online or sitting behind the wheel of a car, it is easier to be impatient and mean when we can’t see each other. Yet we are now unable to engage in the communal activities that most readily facilitate our connection to and understanding of one another.
This is surely why so many of our coping mechanisms involve reminding ourselves that other people are in fact still out there beyond our walls. Whether it is the mantra that we are “in this together,” the rainbow and teddy bear hunts children have created to locate each other through windows, the compilations of musicians and dancers performing “together” from their own homes, the need for the “grid view” in video calls that allows us to see everyone’s faces at once, or the nightly ritual of cheering and applauding from our windows, which is as much a tangible reminder that we are not alone as it is a gesture of support for workers. We need these visceral reminders of connection with a new intensity, because they are the moments that pull our isolated circles back open and remind us of one another. These moments of connection feel like oxygen.
As the duration of this experience has extended, we’ve gotten more skilled at using these new forms of connection. But I’ve also noticed that it seems to be getting harder. We need more. It’s not enough to surface above the water for a moment and take in the air. We are getting tired, because we need to fill our lungs without working quite so hard to break through the waves. Sustaining our sense of connection and patience is taking more emotional effort over time.
We are going to need to build new muscles that enable us to sustain our patience and kindness, even when we can’t see each other and even when our own individual stresses may cloud the limited view that we do have beyond our walls. Our mistakes, and those made by others in our lives, feel magnified. These muscles need to stretch in ways they never have before, so we can all keep each other afloat.
In our art session today, the teachers shared the book, Beautiful Oops by Barney Salzberg, about seeing the value in our mistakes and making something new out of them. We are all going to have many “oops” moments as we figure out how to take care of ourselves, our children, our jobs, and our communities. It is even easier than usual to feel swallowed by these experiences anytime something goes awry or a ball is dropped, because our lives have been so strangely narrowed, making it hard to see beyond the moment. But reminding ourselves to shift our perspective when this happens, whether that means purposefully looking from another person's vantage point or trying to see something different in our own efforts, is the exercise that will make us more capable of creating something beautiful and new out of the mess; we can slowly become more creative, better caretakers and learners, better at seeing each other, and better citizens—all core values of our school community—if we are able to practice and model this changing lens. These moments of seeing something new in something broken and looking for the good intention in an apparent failure will help us to build our endurance, as we practice forgiving our own mistakes, empathizing with our loved ones and those we cannot see, and striving to look at everything with an eye toward what is possible instead of what has fallen apart.
We are all understandably worried about the lack of social connection our children are experiencing right now. I worry about this too. But I also find myself imagining how profoundly our children may be able to change the world for the better someday, if they glean from this experience a deep seeded ability to empathize with others, even when they cannot see them, and turn mistakes into beautiful opportunities. Those are the core skills we are building in ourselves and our children right now, though it may not always feel that way in the moment. Imagine if our children take these skills with them beyond this experience. Imagine if we do. We might just be raising the most resilient, compassionate, creative generation.
Shabbat shalom,
Alicia
Books about Creativity & Compassion
Beautiful Oops by Barney Salzberg
The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken
The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds
Ish by Peter H. Reynolds
Scribble by Deborah Freedman
Blue Chicken by Deborah Freedman
The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires
Perfect Square by Michael Hall
Maybe Something Beautiful by F. Isabel Campoy
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld
What If by Samantha Bergeraa
The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman