My son and I have been doing walkabouts since he was three. In the early years, we would walk into our imaginations and create elaborate stories --usually about dinosaurs. He would start the story and I would add to it. As we walked, we turned our surroundings into a stage for our characters and they would come alive. My son knew all the names of every dinosaur imaginable, what they ate, what they liked and didn't like. So imagine if you will, taking a walk around the city with a Stegosaurus, Tyrannasorus Rex, and a Brachiosaurus just to name a few.
The stories became very involved. It wasn't just about habits, what they ate, and where they lived- there were power struggles, loneliness, shyness, search for friends, fights for attention, and more.Through the stories, I would get to know my son in a way I would have never gotten to know him. Together, we got to explore all kinds of different situations. We both learned things. I feel he learned a great deal about things he was consciously or unconsciously concerned about.
When he got older, the stories turned to discussions and brainstorming. When he was in middle school, he started a small gaming company to develop computer games. We would use our walks to discuss how his business was going. He asked if I'd be willing to be on his Advisory Board, which of course I agreed to do. He wanted advise on how he could better motivate his programmers and sales team. He was only in 6th grade, but he was already learning how hard it is to get some people to do what they said they will do. I would make suggestions and we would bounced ideas off each other to test the suggestion or improve upon it. A few walks later, after a small DVD of his game was finished, he told me that he'd realized and appreciated how dedicated each member of the team had been to get all the levels of the game created.
In 8th or 9th grade, one walk was about an experiment he was conducting. Inspired by his palentologist grandfather, he had buried three chicken carcasses in different solutions (coffee, bleach, etc.) and assessed the variants affect on the carcasses' decomposition - this was all for a Science Fair competition. It was this walk when I knew the tides were turning. His imagination and his education were coming together in a big way. We had become so comfortable with our walkabouts that brainstorming about his new ideas was becoming the norm. We discussed theories, mythology, history, science, along with ideas for new books and interesting recipes for the chili he would compete with every year in the Chomp 'n Stomp chili cook off.
I listened as his thoughts got deeper and deeper. I learned about all his insightful and thought provoking ideas from renovating schools with a nature component to improve the education system to his realization of the disconnectedness that all our connectivity was causing. It made me really appreciate the fact we were still connecting. In Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, by William Pollack, based on over two decades of learning from his Harvard Medical School research, I learned that as a rule boys talk more when they are moving. I figured if I could begin the conversation early enough, I could keep it going. I think it worked. I can't even begin to express how much our walkabouts have meant to me, and while his graduation from high school is approaching and I will miss our weekly walks, he promises we will keep our tradition at least on the holidays. What a gift that will be.
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