On the second day of school, Sofia was crying on a bench. I sat next to her and asked her what the matter was. She said: “I want my Mommy. I want my Daddy.” And for a while this was her response to everything I said.
Then I asked, “What’s your Mommy’s name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“What’s your Daddy’s name?”
“Jay.” She stopped crying to say it.
“Do you know what my name is?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
”Mr. Rick.”
“That’s right! How do you know my name already?”
“My mommy told me.”
“Your mommy’s name is Elizabeth, right?”
“Yes, and this summer …” and she was off telling me one thing after another without punctuation, and then she said, “I know how to climb. Want to see?”
“Sure,” I said. “You show me,” and she was off to climb on the play structure until she was back to tell me that a teacher had told her she had to be in kindergarten before she could climb on the monkey bars.
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” I said. “You have to wait till you’re older to do that.”
“Yes. When I am older I can do that.”
”Right.”
“I can slide down the slide lying down, want to see?”
“Yes. You show me.”
After watching her on the slide, I got talking with a parent. When I saw her next, it was the end of the day. She had a great day and I learned three new names, enjoyed a wonderful conversation, and had an idea.
This conversation gave me a snapshot of a choice that is with us at each moment of our day: Do I act out of fear or out of love? Each of us has inside us a complicated emotional terrain. We have hills and valleys, with some mountaintops of ecstasy and pits of despair. Most of us—certainly kids on the first days of school—are walking a trail up a mountainside. It’s exciting and exhilarating, especially when a change in our lives gives us an opportunity to go to new heights. But higher can also be scarier, and sometimes the trail gets narrow, the mountainside steep, and it occurs to us we might lose our footing and go down instead of up. When we get stuck on a narrow trail, when we’re afraid one more step forward will slide us into the depths, another person can help us find a way forward.
In my conversation with Sofia, I can see now how close the choice between fear and love is. To get Sofia from dependence to independence was a simple matter of changing the subject. Sometimes it can be harder, of course, but I was reminded that I had an ally in my effort to move Sofia from fear to love. The ally was Sofia, herself. Whether it’s a mountain or molehill we have to help the child get over, our best ally is in the very person we want to help. The mind is very creative because the pathways in the brain are myriad. If the familiar path is not working for the organism, the brain gets right to work searching for different routes. In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks writes that in the brain:
… there are hundreds of tiny areas crucial for every aspect of perception and behavior (from the perception of color and of motion to, perhaps, the intellectual orientation of the individual). The miracle is how they all cooperate, are integrated together in the creation of a self … I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of “health” and “disease,” to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined ‘norm.’
