Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Pondering Pint-sized Perseverance

Yesterday, just because the sun was out and the temperature was above five degrees (celsius,) I sat in a small local park and let spring soak into my bones. There was a little girl- about two to three years old- steady on her feet but clearly relatively new to all that could be accomplished once an upright posture is achieved. Dressed in a bright yellow jacket, blue jeans, and pink runners she was intent on her own activity, her head of blonde curls bent in concentration. Her mother watched from a park bench nearby.

Now, set into a very gentle slope that runs from the paved walking path onto the small playing field are two shallow concrete steps. The slope is so slight and the steps are so minimal you have to wonder why they were put there at all. Most folks just step right over them or go around them.

But to this small girl these two steps were an alluring challenge. Over and over she would go to the top step and prepare to jump to the ground, bending her knees, swinging her arms, her small body winding up for the leap to the soft grass below the two steps. She was as focused as any sky-diver. But despite her clear intention, each time, at the last moment, she extended one small foot and stepped down onto the lower step before making the clearly desired and more adventurous two-legged leap onto the grass.

And then she’d go back up the small slope, put herself on the top step and start the process all over again. I could feel my own body tense with anticipation each time she got ready to make the jump from the top step, could see the fear and determination in her small shoulders.

Suddenly, one of the boys who’d been running around the park noticed the aspiring jumper. He was bigger and older than she was- probably four or five years old. He raced over, paused briefly on the top step and leapt into the air with a shout of triumph, landing in a low crouch on the grass below.

The little girl watched him. Her forehead wrinkled into a frown, her eyes were serious, her mouth set in a grim line. I wondered if she would take the ease with which he had done what she’d been trying to do for the last half hour as encouragement or an indication of some kind of personal failure, a reason to give up.

The boy ran off to rejoin his friends, and the girl just stood on the grass looking at the steps for a few moments. And then she went up the slope and started all over again. When I left fifteen minutes later, she was still at it, still trying to summon the courage to jump from the top step, each time pausing just before the leap to take one step down. Perhaps she had taken the boy's agility as encouragement- clearly this was a feat a small human being could accomplish.

Or maybe she knew intuitively that each person’s “edge” where they find a challenge and must stretch to do what they think they cannot, is different. Perhaps she could feel that each time she tried her fear was loosening its grip a little more. Certainly she showed no signs of giving up.

As I headed back to my apartment to try and make some sense out of the note-covered walls (an attempt to organize material in the book I am writing) I thought about how human it is to keep trying, to find a way to do what feels important to us even if it doesn't come easily (and seems to come easily to another) or doesn’t hold particular value for anyone else. It made me smile to think of that small determined child in us all, willing to keep trying, frightened but eager to jump just for the thrill of knowing- hoping- that we can.

Oriah (c) 2013

13 comments:

  1. Great message. We can learn a lot from tiny people.

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    1. I have no doubt that if not that day then on one very soon she will!

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  3. Happy are those adults who could keep their determination of childhood days. Mine was smothered efficiently, but I'm working at rekindling it - with a lot of determination!

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    1. Yes. One of the things about watching this was seeing how the mother allowed the child to find her way. I would not have been allowed this self-determination- would have been told (and forced) to "JUMP NOW!" I did learn to do what frightened me this way- but not from a sense of inner confidence but by disconnecting from my own feeling and doing it anyway. Learning how to explore and learn something challenging while staying in touch with my inner experience (even if that experience is trepidation) took a lot of practice as an adult.

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  4. Oriah,

    Each day I find a way to do what feels important to me, to complete my doctoral in Human and Organizational Development. It doesn't come easily and it is important to no one else but myself. It has been my dream for 35 years! I will complete the effort in another year and a half. The small child inside of me keeps smiling, is determined, is frightened at times, but perseveres. I can!

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    1. Deeply appreciating the example you offer Fritz. It is never too late to allow what we love to fill our lives.

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  5. Nice essay. I can't help but wonder how nice it would have been, if I were that little girl, for her mommy to come up and kneel at the bottom of the stairs and encourage her and maybe even catch her mid-way down and set her on the grass below. The lessons learned would be multiplied by 10.

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    1. Karenna, your comment reminds me that we filter everything we see through our own experience. Because I had a mother who never left me alone to explore but interjected her own agenda the idea of this little girl's mother NOT actively "encouraging" her looked (to me) like lovingly giving the child freedom to be herself- where to someone else, it might look incomplete without that encouragement. For what it is worth this small girl did not seem to be neglected in any way and her mother was watching attentively, while allowing her to do what she wanted. I have no idea if active encouragement would have opened or closed the range of the possible learning for this particular child. :-)

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  6. Yes, our own filter. I pushed myself to accomplish things, I did them well finally, but I did it mostly as a lonely struggle. I've had to learn the joy, trust, connection, fun, group pride of accomplishing something together, and the value of the safety net of family. I guess we need to learn it all: the lonely struggle and the interdependence of connection.

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    1. Karenna- Ah, I can see why the image of the little girl learning on her own would look like freedom to me and loneliness to you. I'm not sure we "need" to learn lonely struggle (or to be overwhelmingly controlled by another) but sometimes that's just what happens and so we learn from what was the best we can. Perhaps I now work well on my own- which is handy for a writer- (and you may work particularly well with others) because we appreciate now having what we did not have when we were younger.

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  7. Reading the comments this week reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It is from the book "The Cloud of Unknowing". If goes like this: In the interior life we should never think that our own experience is the norm for anyone else." As a child and now as a very old adult, I thrive from loving encouragement, but I have learned courage through independent. We never know the life of another, what helps them through life, what discourages them. If is the journey, the learning, the trying, that teaches us, molds and shapes us as we continue to unfold, and finally, hopefully, offers us wisdom.BrendaP

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