Riding bikes was the general mode of transportation in my youth. I had a bright yellow banana seat and a basket with daisies on it. I went everywhere I was allowed and a lot of places I wasn’t. I don’t remember having to dodge cars. I was just looking for the next big hill, so I could lift my feet up and cruise down with the wind in my hair – I didn’t wear a helmet and most of time I didn’t even hold on to the handlebars. If there was something to be afraid of, I didn’t know about it. I just took things as they came.
Now days, we teach our children to be afraid of what might be around the bend. Thanks to all the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ media, we’ve forgotten the fact that things could actually be okay. We've lost trust in the kindness of strangers. We assume people are all out for themselves and will run you down just so they can make the light. That kind of myopic thinking leaves our children in a precarious position. They’ve grown up believing to feel safe, they need to just stay in safe places. But where’s that? Many think it’s at home next to their computer or with a big group at a neighborhood park. Others might even go so far as to think it’s anywhere a parent is. Unfortunately, that doesn’t teach them to be safe. Safety should really be taught as if it was a verb.
Last year, when Lenore Skenazy, confessed in a New York Sun article, “Why I Let My 9-year old Son Ride the Subway Alone”, there was a huge uproar. Her son didn’t have a cell phone. She didn’t follow him around to make sure he made good decisions. She left him completely alone and (the public flogged her saying it had to have been a miracle) he got home safe. Though deemed America’s Worst Mom, I think she tapped into a major teachable moment. How are we ever going to let our kids know they have the power to keep themselves safe if we don’t let them practice it? Skenazy said it’s hard for people to define risk these days especially when it comes to our children. I agree. I would go so far as to say, we’ve become obsessed with catastrophic thinking at the expense of allowing our children to use their own instincts and good sense.
Remember when you were nine? Why is it so different now, because we’ve allowed the media to scare us into thinking it is? It isn’t. Some of the worst murders happened in 1800’s, read “Devil in the White City”, by Erik Larson. There is and will be bad people and tragedy always and forever. More important, there will always be good people and magic. Our children deserve to feel that. They deserve to know their own power to trust their instincts in navigating through the unknown.
I always felt it was important to teach my son that life is about change, and about learning to be flexible enough to move through it without breaking. I also believe it’s good to teach there are some things you can count on, like your own ability to sense danger, to get through unfamiliar territory, and to keep yourself safe. Yes terrible things could happen, but we are so quick to forget that things do go right a lot of the time. Like Dr. Seuss says in All the Thinks You Can Think, “You can think about left. Or you can think about right. You can think about that until Saturday night.”
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Expanding Time in a Moment
Live in the present. Be here now. Are you paying attention? Probably not, most of us are either thinking about the past or dreaming about the future. So, the interstitial space between gets past over like an old dog in a pound. Recollection is impossible, because there’s no recorded data in the moment. It’s as if it never existed.
Einstein’s theory of relativity placed all time past, present, and future in one space. Richard Feynman proposed time was a sum of histories, basically a story with a sequence with infinite possible directions – oscillating paths, backwards, or squiggly swirls. It didn’t have to be linear. Stephen Hawking’s and Hartle saw time as having no boundaries.
Regardless of theory, our clock sets a boundary we’re trained like Pavlov’s dogs to follow. According to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), there are 86,400 seconds in a day. That’s a lot of time if you are really present for it all. 50% of our sleep time is spent dreaming in REM. The other 50% is well, I imagine dancing somewhere between Einstein, Feynman, Hawking’s, and Hartle’s notions of time. Then we have what about 16 more hours. What to do, what to do?
Just like everything in our existence there’s a lot of waste. Inattentive passage of precious time we only lament after it’s gone. However, if the brain could “summon” the power it attains in a tragedy, not only would every second be accounted for, those seconds would be split and divided into infinite calibrations of extra time: expanded time.
Think about a moment that was probably the worst time of your life. I was nine months and two weeks pregnant. My husband at the time had brought me to the hospital to have an outpatient procedure that was supposed to put me into labor. But something was very wrong. They couldn’t find my baby’s heartbeat. I was no longer dreaming about my baby’s first cry, or reminiscing about when my husband proposed to me. I was shocked into the now. I was never more present, ever in my life, than in that moment.
To this day, I can recall every minute detail of that time. What book my husband was reading, the blood draining from his face when he looked up from it, Chet Baker singing from a boom box, the wrinkles of worry in my doctor’s facial expression, the medicinal metallic smell of the operating room, the scratchy texture of the sheets, and most of all the blue-skinned cry of my son -followed by the terror of responsibility building with vigilante zeal inside me, knowing I had to keep him safe from harm from now on. It was a hyper-conscious reality. I will never forget it.
I’m not proposing we recreate tragedy. I am wondering how we could recreate the suspension and subsequent expansion of time that happens in difficult moments. I think for starters, if we mentally slow everything so far down that in essence we could actually see the infinitality of time [think Keanu Reeves in the hallway when the bullet comes toward him in the Matrix] we would find much more fulfillment. Yes, it would take A LOT of practice. But it seems so worth it. Not only would we be getting closer to experiencing time as all the great scientists were able to envision it. Nothing would be wasted. Our attention would be so focused, we would all make much better choices -and who knows where the sum of our histories could take us in a boundless universe.
Einstein’s theory of relativity placed all time past, present, and future in one space. Richard Feynman proposed time was a sum of histories, basically a story with a sequence with infinite possible directions – oscillating paths, backwards, or squiggly swirls. It didn’t have to be linear. Stephen Hawking’s and Hartle saw time as having no boundaries.
Regardless of theory, our clock sets a boundary we’re trained like Pavlov’s dogs to follow. According to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), there are 86,400 seconds in a day. That’s a lot of time if you are really present for it all. 50% of our sleep time is spent dreaming in REM. The other 50% is well, I imagine dancing somewhere between Einstein, Feynman, Hawking’s, and Hartle’s notions of time. Then we have what about 16 more hours. What to do, what to do?
Just like everything in our existence there’s a lot of waste. Inattentive passage of precious time we only lament after it’s gone. However, if the brain could “summon” the power it attains in a tragedy, not only would every second be accounted for, those seconds would be split and divided into infinite calibrations of extra time: expanded time.
Think about a moment that was probably the worst time of your life. I was nine months and two weeks pregnant. My husband at the time had brought me to the hospital to have an outpatient procedure that was supposed to put me into labor. But something was very wrong. They couldn’t find my baby’s heartbeat. I was no longer dreaming about my baby’s first cry, or reminiscing about when my husband proposed to me. I was shocked into the now. I was never more present, ever in my life, than in that moment.
To this day, I can recall every minute detail of that time. What book my husband was reading, the blood draining from his face when he looked up from it, Chet Baker singing from a boom box, the wrinkles of worry in my doctor’s facial expression, the medicinal metallic smell of the operating room, the scratchy texture of the sheets, and most of all the blue-skinned cry of my son -followed by the terror of responsibility building with vigilante zeal inside me, knowing I had to keep him safe from harm from now on. It was a hyper-conscious reality. I will never forget it.
I’m not proposing we recreate tragedy. I am wondering how we could recreate the suspension and subsequent expansion of time that happens in difficult moments. I think for starters, if we mentally slow everything so far down that in essence we could actually see the infinitality of time [think Keanu Reeves in the hallway when the bullet comes toward him in the Matrix] we would find much more fulfillment. Yes, it would take A LOT of practice. But it seems so worth it. Not only would we be getting closer to experiencing time as all the great scientists were able to envision it. Nothing would be wasted. Our attention would be so focused, we would all make much better choices -and who knows where the sum of our histories could take us in a boundless universe.
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