If you stop to think about it, the magician is the only one in the room who does not experience the magic.
Uncle Frankie was a magician. As kids, my cousins and I were in awe by the stuff he has up his sleeves.
I was constantly trying to outsmart him and burst his bubble. But here’s what I discovered later in my life: Even if I figured out his “trick,” I could not perform the magic the way he did it.
And when we bring magic to others, we get to experience a different kind of magic: The magic of witnessing someone experience a sudden moment of transformation.
Conversational Magic
Conversations are like magic
It’s bizarre. The air pressures leaving your mouth, converting into sounds and meaning enters the heart and mind of the other, and for better or worse, creates an impact.
All of us are magicians, really. We have the power to do what my Uncle Frankie does.
But first, we must be intentional. Then we can find a way.
The relational craft is to learn the praxis of languaging our intent. Wanna see where our intention gets lost in our blunt art of conversation? Just listen to parents talk to their kids. The effect is often not what we intended.
To Be Altered
And, perhaps more importantly, we have to let the words of the other alter us.
“Instead of telling actors that they must be good listeners (which is confusing),” says renowned improv teacher, Keith Johnstone, “We should say, ‘Be altered by what’s said.’”
We have to learn to ask and hear the needs of others, and let that reconfigure our point of reference.
Theologian John S. Dunne describes empathy as “passing over,” where we enter into the thoughts, feelings and imaginations of the other.
Passing over is never total but is always partial and incomplete. And there is an equal and opposite process of coming back to oneself.
In short, something beautiful is created when we are willing to be altered as we gracefully leave ourselves, to “pass over” and put our attention to the experience of the other.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
~ Herbert Simon.
There is a prescient quality to the words above made in 1971, made by a pioneering figure in cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence.
It is not new news that our attention is up for grabs.
Listen to Joe Rogan’s calling out the potential “massive distraction” of AR glasses, while Mark Zuckerberg actually thinks it’s a good idea.
What is an Algorithm?
Cathy O’ Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction describes algorithms as using historical information to make predictions.
If our future is asymmetrically left to people who owns the code, we are going to get a world that is designed for people who shaped Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and the like.
Joe Rogan’s response should also be our responses: Why should we let our attention be stolen, every day, every other minute?
But there is a greater worry. The warning we must take heed is not only that our attention and time is lost. More insidiously, our intentions are getting thwarted and pushed to the wayside.
I grew up skateboarding. It was my escape plan. It took me places. I learned mastery from skateboarding. I learned to hide injuries from my father, cos’ the pain of the falls are less than the wrath of my father.
I recently watched a video of a girl learning to do tricks on a skateboard over a 12-month period.
It’s incredible. It’s like watching a time-lapse video of a plant grow. She made incremental gains, some bad falls, and also some giant leaps.
But what was striking was the recurrent comments made by others about the video:
I worry that we have been hyper-conscious. In literal ways, the mirror is overy-reflected back on ourselves (Read this: Point Your Camera to the World). We can’t help but obsess about how our hair looks on a Zoom call.
An aside: This is also why if you are learning to practice a speech, despite conventional wisdom, the worse thing to do is to practice in front of a mirror. The focus isn’t about you. It’s your audience.
We all need to find a way to lose ourselves, and get deeply engaged into things that make us come alive.
Here’s one my best mates, psychologist and ex-Navy officer, Eng Chuan, learning to skateboard at age 57.
The experience of grief is not something we would ask for. Grief does not ask for our permission to exist.
Grief is not only losing something or someone outside of our selves. When we lose someone we love, we lose a part of ourselves. It is heartrending.
Steeped in our everyday exchanges , we are sublimated not to think about death. In my Chinese tradition, some might say it’s bad luck to speak about dying. In response, we say “Choi,” in Cantonese, to ward off the words – or even just having those thoughts – articulated.
You could say that reckoning with grief is like trying to stare at the sun. If you look at it directly, it blinds you. But, it illuminates everything. Our world revolves around it.
“Grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view… and love is a way of grieving that which it has not yet done so.”
And if we can stand in the sun and take this in for a minute, I believe this will lead us to a place of love again.
Put another way, befriending grief on a daily basis passes us through a threshold from floating along in live to a certain sense of wakefulness.
Like the emphasis we give to our dental hygiene, what we need now is a society of individuals who values and engages in the process of waking up on daily – twice a day.
Wakefulness is the hidden prerequisite to presence.
And what constitutes this contemplation of daily waking up? To be a practitioner of grief.
This is not a grim and austere exercise. Instead, it rends our hearts open to reality… a reality that doesn’t need our consent, that life is finite. Because of its finality, evermore the poignancy of our living.
Buy a flower and put it on your dining table. Its presence differs to a plastic creation. The living flower will wither, the fake models what’s real, but never so. Yet, the flower’s existence penetrates into our consciousness (and if we learn to take it in) of both its temporalness and its gravity of beauty.
A way to grief is to slow down time to love, and a way to love is to befriend grief.
It treats the people who delivers the service solely as a means as to an end.
It fails to notice that those who give care, also needs to be part of a community of care.
It dispenses wellbeing gift wrapped and surrounded with the rah-rah cheerleading of “Self-Care,” and not address the need for communal caring.
Ultimately, the greatest violation is the violation of the dignity of the human spirit.
An organisation that is sick is not able to heal those they seek to heal. Rather, they perpetuate a disease.
An organisation that is designed to help others needs to make sure that people who are in the caring profession are cared for.
The moment we push for more, as if we are productive bots, we engage in a form of violence.
Here’s Thomas Merton talking about this exact issue more than 50 years ago.
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
~Thomas Merton
A Smorgasbord of Tips to Keep Your Kids Engaged, Learning and Connected During Home Isolation.
Note: This article is cross-posted on two of my blog sites,Frontiers of PsychotherapistDevelopment and Full Circles. While FPD aims to help therapists, and FC is more for a general audience, I figured professionals and parents might equally benefit from this.
Click on the buttons below to receive an entire list of ideas to engage your kids during this pandemic that has affected all across the world…plus more relevant resources to dig in a little further!
When we were having our first child, we decided that we are going to enlist the help of a Doula. “Do-what?” you might say. Here’s an explainer.
The way I saw it, she was like our personal coach and companion before, during and after the birthing process, a critical bridgecrossing phase.
What we learned about our doula Catherine was that not only did she have 4 kids, they were all homeschooled!
Maybe your reaction is like my wife and I. How is that humanly possible to home school a kid 24/7, let alone 4?!
I can imagine Catherine’s response to us neophytes at trying to homeschool our kids during this outbreak. Truth is, from what I’ve understood from Catherine and reading books on homeschooling (e.g., I highly recommend Brave Learner by Julie Bogart or check out this website), what the majority of us are doing is nowhere near what homeschooling really is about. It’s more like “isolated” schooling. The “home” in homeschooling is not confined to our place of residence. It’s much more expansive than outsiders might think (If you are interested, read more about Jonathan Holt’s views on homeschooling.
But this doesn’t mean that we should throw our hands up. What are going to do stuck at home with our kids during this pandemic? Maybe you might be confronted with feeling inadequate as a parent, but the truth is, parenting is less like a fixed classical music piece with musical sheets to follow, but more like a jazz improvisational jam; you never know what’s come next.
When I first read Jonathan Holt’s seminal book, How Children Learn, I remember one of the early advice in his writing was “to trust kids.” This could not be further from my educational experience growing up in Singapore. Schools told you what to learn. What Holt, and perhaps more Montessori-typed schools promote is to be child-directed.
But if you dig a little further, Maria Montessori said,
”Follow your child, but follow your child as his leader.”
There is no other more important thing for parent(s) to take the lead than during a critical crisis period that has swept the world. We have to “follow your child” and their curiosity, but also dance in this fragile balance of exercising leadership.
I argue that the leadership we need as parents is to design our home environments that nurtures not only the mind, but also feed the soul with how they experience humanity and the world around us. (While we try to juggle working from home and caring for others, be it elderly parents and young ones).
The last few weeks, my family and I, like many others around the world, have been in home isolation. My wife and younger child developed symptoms of fever and cough, and the only prudent thing to do was to self-isolate for the next few weeks. We don’t know if it’s COVID-19, as they do not meet the criteria for testing, but speaking to our GP on a telehealth consult was reassuring.
Like it or not, we are all homeschoolers now. As a recent articlestates, this pandemic “will bring about an education reevaluation, if not revolution” of how our education system.
Majority of the ideas in this list to keep your kids engaged, learning and connected during these home-bound times were “guinea pigged” in our family of four, with our 6 and 3-year-olds. Some were figured out along the way, and many were grafted from resources I’ve picked up across the years (see below for some of the good ones), and others were employed through the years in my work with families as a therapist.
If you would like to have a buffet of ideas to engage your kids, moving beyond just “isolated” schooling and borrow some of the richness of homeschooling during this period of home isolation, click on the link below to get yourFREE guide.
Do you have other tips for home schooling? Love to hear your ideas. Share them in the comments below.
Reading a book is like having a deep conversation.*
Watching a movie is like experiencing vivid dreaming.
Listening to music is like hearing the sound of emotions.
Viewing a photograph or a painting is like stopping time.
All forms of art, provides an opportunity to engage in an aesthetic experience.
A doctor applies an anaesthetic when she wants the patient to feel nothing. Anaesthetic leads to numbness. On the other hand, an aesthetic awareness is a door to wonderment.
So much of what we consume today is like anaesthesia. Yet, what is needed is aesthetics thatun-numbs us, that provides us a “waking up” to the inherent beauty that is possible to be engaged with.
As Proust says, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Engaging in art has a way of clearing the fog in our eyes and waking our senses.
Art might be “useless” in a conventional economy paradigm, but it is highly valuable from what it means to be human.
Footnote:
*Reading a poem is like listening to the the truth, told “slant”.
As a modern species, I wonder if we have become explainaholics. We start to theorise, analyse, and explain things away, and thus become detached from a lived and engaged reality. (I talked more about the phenomena on becoming an “explainaholic” in my other blog site, Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development.)
Particularly, there is a danger of that happening in what I do as a psychotherapist, which can sometimes slip into an over-focus “interiorising.”
Here’s what depth psychologist James Hillman recommends why we need to look outside of ourselves:
Say you pass a homeless man on the street and you share that with your therapist. Your therapist says to you that you feel for this man because it resonates with the homeless part of you. By the time you make that reflection, by the time you have interiorised, you have passed the homeless man on the street… you lose the emotions to the world by interiorising.
There are inner conflict and wounds that need tending to on the inside that is not visible to others, but I would argue we must not stop them. Life is outside waiting for us to be engaged with. To learn, to love, to have our hearts broken, and mended back. To create, to relate. To make blunders, and to rediscover ourselves.
In his new book, Life’s Great Questions, the author Tom Rath shares a speech made by a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question…
What are you doing for others?”
MLK was only 29 years old at that time. Rath goes on, “Yet it is easy to see how, in the remaining decade of his life, Dr. King dedicated almost all of his time to answering this question. In doing so, he showed us how orienting your efforts outward creates perpetual growth for generations to come.”
When we feel the weight of love and joy for the people we care about, we begin to feel the full potency of loss.
Love’s near other is loss.
This surge of pending grief can be almost too much to bear, but if we find a vessel, a holding, a way of living to contain and channel this reality, this has the potential to fully awaken us to the participation of living with presence.
Living with presence in a way that is accord to our true intentions, while penetrating through the noise that permeates most of our existence.
Recent Comments