They Thought I Was a Flower

Looking back at my life, I see a train of constant normative clauses planted into me: "do better," "you're bad at this, improve it," "don't do that again, this is the way." And that's how we learn, I guess, and it feels like we're never good enough, there's always some higher unmet need, there's always the proverbial carrot ahead.

But sometimes, as you run from the events that constantly seem to beat you up with your faults, have you thought to stop, and turn straight back toward whatever you're running from, and embrace the fight for who you are?

A few years ago, I was on a business call I'd prepared for, and I had someone watching my four year old daughter so I could talk. A few minutes in, a drama episode begins. I hear my daughter crying, screaming. The person comes apologizing, tells me I'm needed. Frustrated, evidently, I pause the call, ready to go to war. Intelligence quickly catches up though, this is serious, not child's play. My daughter had been running outside and got stung by a dozen or so mud wasps chasing her. I'm ready to put together a plan to exterminate those creatures, but my crying four year old, in her underwear, and with visible sting marks, steps in front of me and says, "papa, they didn't know, they thought I was a flower." I don't know how you'd react, but it really exterminated a portion of my thinking instead, and swiftly. I went back to my call, she was fine, recovering, dealing with the pain, but the episode kept coming back to me.

We train the future generations of us to follow a "do as I say or else" routine. We dedicate time, money, well, any parent feels the same sacrifice, and statistically, it never gives us the results we wanted.

The note I took for myself is that we might be seriously limiting, or even deforming, what we are capable of truly becoming.

What if what you assume as learning, as getting-better, is in fact just forming you to fit into a monotonous mold of your localized society?

And what's worse, what you're following, trying to be what the pressure around you suggests, it also forms you to fail, since that is another specific trait of that same society.

You have to go to school. No, I mean a "good" school. You have to get "good" grades. No, not those, the "best" grades, or you might still be lost in life. And while you try for those, you really have to be good at math. And at reading. And better than "the others," because otherwise you will not get into a "good" college. And because it would really please us as parents, could you get into an Ivy League school, and maybe, just maybe you might be okay in life. And then if you could land a very good job too...

So pretend you are that child, you've gone through some variety of that rollercoaster, you're grown up now. Look around, how does the world look, really? Is it those "perfect ones" versus the rest of us? Have "they" gotten further in the journey of life? Frankly, I see more concerns the other way around.

While the example might be too plastic, and it is not an attempt to convert parents because that will not work, we, the children, should really try, sometimes, to fight working incredibly hard to refine, or improve, something, and instead grow with it. Apply yourself the way you are, the way you see it, and you might find new doors opening, and your true self shining, allowing a deeper you to make it through this life.

I struggled for years to be good at chemistry in school. Never worked for me. Traumatized me. Scroll forward, one of my strengths became solving problems that are technical, without knowing the area. I had a situation where the only way to move forward was to really understand chemistry. I started from being joked at by experienced chemists, to transforming the very process they had created, them now asking me how I did it. I still do not know chemistry, I would likely flunk any test. What it proved, is that maybe for someone, mastering chemistry as an absolute is a given, but for others, they can handle such a topic from their own different perspective, and it means something else, but equally important.

I wonder if we will get to see a change in how we educate and shape our future. I wonder if I could double down on my daughter's thinking pattern that made me feel like a neanderthal, if I could help her instead to mature into something that I never had a chance for.