We arrive on Earth, blessed with a human existence, the most formidable and influential being on the planet, but with no clear instructions or even a manual to tell us what to do or how to be. It is left to us to decide, but how?
We arrive on Earth, blessed with a human existence, the most formidable and influential being on the planet, but with no clear instructions or even a manual to tell us what to do or how to be. It is left to us to decide, but how?
The best of us grapple with the question of what is right and discover before us two clear paths. We can try to educate ourselves, but we often discover to our dismay that the information that is presented as gospel today may turn out to be merely what was the best researched, best funded, or most popular answer at the time. When we discover that even those with the greatest levels of education, like doctors or lawyers, only had to know eighty percent of what they were taught at that time, we can lose confidence with that path. So we seek another.
Some take a more personal path, one based on instinct and experience. Those who do soon discover, as every self-taught person eventually does, that their coach was an idiot, that our instincts are unreliable indicators at best, and that experience only yields her lesson after the test has been failed, if that failure was not in itself fatal, and only if the survivor is able to figure out what the lesson actually was.
The difficulty of our situation is compounded by the fact that we become capable of, and often are driven toward procreation long before we ourselves have yet come to any functional understanding of what is going on, as were our parents. There is no school for parents, no degree or license required. It is perhaps the most important job we will ever have, yet we have less real training in how to do it than does our local crossing guard. So what do we do?
We do our best. We try to avoid what we felt were the pitfalls our parents stumbled into, but the going is treacherous, advice contradictory, sometimes making it seem that there really are no steps we can take in the right direction at all. If we restrict our kids to a healthy diet, they resent it when they get to school and see all the goodies they’re being denied. If we indulge their obsession with phones and games so that they can fit in at school, their studies and sleep suffer. So we rely on others to help.
Like parents, coaches and teachers can be tremendous resources to a child’s development, but this relationship has its pitfalls too. Even the best teacher is not perfect; they are, as we all are, a product of their upbringing and can only teach other what they have truly learned themselves. If the teacher is excellent, they realize this, remain open and know that they are still on a path of discovery. Just like excellent parents do.
Excellent parents know that they are always educating and try hard to ensure they are living the right way and teaching the right things, but that’s not always easy. Like the parent who is moved to involve the Principal as a way to show that they support and love their child when they return home upset that the teacher snatched off their hat, gave them a bad mark, or a time-out, but who later (often much later) discovers that the ‘A’ their child eventually received had more to do with that teacher’s learned apathy than any brains or aptitude their child possessed. If an educator has done something wrong they need to be made aware of that, but parents, coaches and teachers are a team, and that team has to rely on one tool, perhaps the best tool any one of us can use to negotiate the minefield of life: care.
To fully understand and embrace care as a way of being is to know its two sides. First is to be care-full, to have a vigilant attention, to be mindful, lucid in our dealings with the situations we encounter. Second is to be care-ing, to carry a heartfelt concern for the well-being of oneself and others. As social creatures, we need to rely on each other as we stumble through this existence. We’re on the same team. Life is difficult.