In the last year I have been spending a lot of time around a five year old. Let’s call her “The Child.” The cool thing about kids is that they are learning all the time. Everything is new. You and I take stuff like what symbols are used to indicate safely walking across the street for granted and yet to a child this is new information. Every day, it seems, something significant is learned and processed by a child’s brain that will later become rote background information but is now revelatory new information. Split a half in two and you get two quarters, yes like a quarter dollar, four quarters make up one dollar. Etc.
A big focus recently has been on reading. For about the last year The Child has possessed the cognitive skills to read. Letters and their various sounds were known as were combinations of sounds to make bigger sounds or larger words. Using this knowledge of sounds, words could be sounded out and thus read. Yet, despite these skills being in place for over a year “reading” was not something she was comfortable with. It was intimidating. In the last few months, however, that intimidation has shifted to interest and excitement. Instead of being read to she want to be the one who reads.
Watching this process unfold reminded me of myself as a little person. I remember one day standing in front of that huge book shelf at school (probably less than three feet tall) and staring down those rows of books in a game of chicken until I walked up, picked one out, sat down with the book, and began to read. Once that initial hurdle was past I was a reader. It took finding science fiction much later in life to be an avid reader but nonetheless, the process was begun.
Watching this process go on in someone else has made me think about how much of life, particularly where it involves skill sets or any sense of identity, comes down to choice. We do this all the time. Life presents us with a challenge and if we do not already have the necessary skill set we say we do not do such and such a thing. We are not saying we can’t but rather we won’t. “I don’t understand computers” often means “I am intimidated by computers and would rather live in fear and ignorance of them than learn a new skill.” It comes down to choice.
We have a choice, to limit ourselves and say “I am nothing more than what I already know,” or to explore the unknown with the wonder of a child asking how something works and why it does so. The choice is between a fixed notion of self or a dynamic and fluid self. It is a choice between looking at life as a series of endings, as a series of walls. Or looking at life as new beginnings and doorways opening onto new vistas of possibility.
One project I am working on currently is forcing me to get a much deeper understanding of computers and video projectors, not to mention rethinking how to call a cue. For a while, despite saying I was trying and despite convincing myself I wanted to learn, I was resisting. It was not overt (and certainly not conscious) but I was pushing against the new information because it would force me to rethink how I do things (and in a small way, who I am). As a dance piece, for which I am lighting designer and stage manager, I had to find a new way to call and execute cues. The video system requires much more involvement during set up and playback than does a lighting system thus requiring a different skillset than I am used to when running a show. Also the computer runs on a different operating system than I typically work on so there were new things to learn there as well.
The whole process was getting me rather frustrated until one day I realized the trouble was not in the interface (there were problems with the interface but I was reacting out of proportion to the technical difficulties) but in my orientation to it. Rather than treating this as a new skill and new opportunity for learning and growth I kept wanting it to be what I already knew and would get frustrated when it was something other than that. In that direction lies madness. The first step to sanity is recognizing reality for what it is and acting from there. Getting frustrated because reality is different than you want gets you nowhere. Accept reality. Then you can work to change it, or work to understand it.
While there are areas that I am constantly challenging myself (I intentionally try out new ideas in my lighting all the time and see artistic evolution as central to being an artist) there are other areas where I am as stuck in routine as anyone else. Spending time in the presence of children has certainly helped me to choose to learn. It has helped me to see how everything we know and everything we do is learned. And more importantly than that, the act of learning is a choice.
What will you choose?
This is what I always tell my students:
There’s one difference, and one difference only, between a successful student and an unsuccessful student.
An unsuccessful student encounters something difficult and says, “That’s difficult; fuck that.” A successful student encounters something difficult and says, “That’s difficult; I’m going to stick to it until I figure it out.”
I also tell them: College is hard. It’s supposed to be. If it was easy, we’d call it your mom.
OK, I don’t really say that, but I do say that the level of difficulty mastered and work required in obtaining a college education are part of what makes it valuable.