Hanging Out In The Gray Area

At the Unquowa School annual meeting this week the Head of School, Sharon Lauer, spoke briefly about “loving the gray area.”  Never mind black or white, just so I can have “my gray.” She went on to say that Unquowa was a school that fostered and provided a container for kids to inhabit the “gray area” as they learned history, literature and explored the nature of different cultures.

I found myself imagining a child in the Maker Space—see blog: Social Skill Are Marketable Assets—gradually creating something with wood, a few nails, some fabric and markers and an adult comes along and inquires, “What are you making?”  The student answers, “I don’t know  . . .yet.”

 Whether it is an idea not yet fully formed, research not yet complete, or bits of something not yet expressing an end product, hanging out in the gray area means, “I don’t know . . .yet.”

It is the gray area, the “I don’t know “space, that is pregnant with possibilities. Buddhists teach us to “soften the mind,” to remain open to whatever might reveal itself: not to be so attached to our concepts and our opinions as if they were poured in concrete. When we do that we shut down not only to new pathways of thinking for ourselves; we also imprison others in our rigidly held views of them. We are all changing, shifting all of the time: some of us more than others, it’s true—the word “curmudgeon” didn’t arise out of nowhere—but at least, if we allow it, we are capable of actually changing, opening, our minds. “Allowing” being the key word here.

Essentially in our culture there are two respected states of mind: “Yes” and “No.” Clear-minded thinkers inhabit those spaces comfortably and with a certain culturally supported smugness. In Eastern thought there are three respected states of mind: “Yes”, “No” and “I don’t know.” And inherent in “I don’t know” are the possibilities, as I have said. When we trust and love the process for itself, new behaviors and potentially creative action can emerge.

This is not to say that we must never be decisive. Not at all. For example, the able Treasurer of the school can’t stand up at the annual meeting and report that she just “doesn’t know yet” what the financial condition of the school is. That would hardly go down well. Doctors are incredibly stuck in needing to know and preferably right now.  We want that certainty from them.

Nonetheless, a school that allows kids to hang out comfortably in the gray areas, helps to form creative and tolerant adults. Whenever we become aware of just how tightly wound we are about a particular situation or point of view, we can offer ourselves that same sort of release and relaxation.  We can take some deep breaths, soften, and “try on” another viewpoint. It won’t hurt a bit.

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Our thoughts and prayers are with those who lost loved ones in Paris on  Friday night. Trinity Episcopal Church Southport held a candle light vigil on Saturday evening. We prayed for the innocent dead, we prayed for the families and friends who mourn. We prayed for healing for those who kill in God's name that they may be released from the need to terrorize and be freed from their hatred. We prayed for peace in the world and for the collaborative wisdom  of the free world to create an effective and sage response to terrorism.

Social Skills Are Marketable Assets: Who knew?

 On Saturday, The New York Times posted an article entitled, Why What You Learned In Preschool Is Crucial At Work, by Clare Cain Miller. Perhaps some of you saw it. I hope so.

Miller begins by telling us “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.”

“Skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility,” Miller goes on to say, ”have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”

And get this: According to Miller, research shows that “occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills. The jobs hit hardest” in the economic downturn “seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.”

What does this mean for our kids and us? I would include the world over. There is no doubt about it: We need to figure out how to work with each other in school, in the workplace and in the world.

I have been taught well how arrogant the United States seems to other countries. My first—of many--summer in the UK introduced me to how we are perceived. And the English are our friends! Culturally they are the most like us. Nonetheless every social gathering I attended offered me another earful about our irritating superiority, our failure to grapple with the subtleties of other cultures in order to come to the table with them effectively. In British opinion we are deficient in negotiating and mediating, in all manner of diplomacy. 

 The Times article goes on to reveal that “James Heckman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that non-cognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.”

Except in preschool and the early grades. By the time we are in college, we sit in lecture halls, rarely studying in groups, creating in groups or doing any serious work cooperatively. We are not invited to “engage in productive partnerships,” combining our various skills for a better outcome.

The Unquowa School in Fairfield, CT—preK3 through grade eight--has a room they call “The Maker Space” where kids can collaboratively or individually build things. Anything. There are all sorts of building materials in the space, available on open, reachable shelves and the kids are allowed to let their imaginations run. Four of them may be putting together a small table; a group may be painting one large picture, six or more may be constructing an elaborate edifice at the large Lego table.

The hope of the world

The Maker Space offers the perfect laboratory for collaboration and cooperation. What was once perceived as simply play time, according to Miller, has the potential for developing highly remunerative skills. It’s not about the table or the painting, although the product may please them—or not? It’s about the ability to cooperate on a project larger than one’s own perception and developing the ability to empathize and be flexible with your co-workers during the process.

We live in a demanding and increasingly global society. I am encouraged by Miller’s article which informs us that a person trained in empathic and collaborative skills, as well as good cognitive skills, is not made obsolete by robots or even our blind-seeming, non-stop drive for supremacy and power. On the contrary, statistics are demonstrating that such an individual is highly desirable in the marketplace and a valuable asset in our competitive and complex world, to say nothing of being a better human being.

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Some collaborative "what ifs:"

What if the all drug companies collaborated their cancer research toward a cure for the disease instead of engaging in a cut throat competition that puts cure out of the picture and makes "managing" cancer the goal: a goal none of us can afford. 

What if all of the prosperous countries of the world agreed to collaborate on the goal that no child anywhere in the world would go to bed hungry?

What if all the nuclear empowered nations collaborated to take nuclear weapons off the table? Period. Gone.

Graduation: More Than Just The Students Saying Goodbye

 In spite of the bucketing rain outside, inside, the Unquowa School gym looked festive, all dressed up for the eighth grade graduation. Enormous containers of gorgeous flowers were featured on either side of the white- sheeted, make-do platform, a substitute for the real stage, which will be built this summer. Some parents were early, establishing good seats, and others were just milling and chatting. A joyful buzz filled the huge space.

Folding chairs of light wood formed neat rows on either side of a central aisle. On the backs of the chairs in two rows in the front were signs that read: Board Of Governors. That’s me, I thought, with a shudder of pleasure and awe, as I stood in the far back corner of the gym, just looking and watching.

The weather, being 57 degrees, I was not, after all, wearing the new flower-splashed cotton dress I wrote about in Buying The Dress. Instead I was clothed in a warmer dress and jacket, On my jacket lapel I had pinned my grandmother’s gold bar pin with the row of tiny seed pearls, which she had given me when I was fourteen. My grandmother was a founder of this school; I had worn it to honor her.

I stood there, remembering. My older sister and I and my brother all graduated from this school. It was just yesterday, wasn’t it? Gazing at the Unquowa School banners—green and white-- attached high along the walls of the gym, instinctively I reached for my cellphone. A picture of all of this, I thought, to send to my brother, whom I would call the minute I got home. I would share with him every detail of what happened here this afternoon. He would love it.

And suddenly tears flooded my eyes because my brother, that adorable eighth grader in the 1950 graduating class picture that hangs on an upstairs wall of this school, is dead. He has been dead since December 22. How could I, even for that one flashing moment have forgotten? And how could he not be alive for me to share this event with him? Shattered, I fumbled around in my pocketbook for a Kleenex and hoped no one would notice the new board member weeping-- even before the band played Pomp and Circumstance.

And that is what grief can do to you, isn’t it? So bloody weird! You think that the original tsunami of your grief has subsided, and maybe it really has. Mine seemed to me to have been reduced from an impenetrable, sodden, weighty, dark fog, to a lighter, rather filmy mist through which I could sometimes hear him laughing, or feel his presence beside me as I recognized the foolishness of life—his strong suit—or when I wrote a sentence I knew he would like. But this? To be so caught up by this moment, in this school, in childhood memory that I actually experienced that momentary forgetfulness of his death? What a shock!

I know this about grief. I’ve helped others through it but never have experienced personally the delusional assumption of a life continuing when it has ceased. Widows, I know, have caught themselves over and over again saying, “I must remember to tell . . .” and then, stunned, recalled that their husbands are no longer here to share anything with. That stabbing reality can catapult a grieving person into emptiness as vast as the Grand Canyon and it can take a while to climb out.

The graduation was wonderful: so much promising young life: girls in white dresses, wobbling on wedged high heels. Boys of basketball-player height standing with friends: other boys half their size. All of the eighth grade beaming with happiness: parents and grandparents applauding. Such exalted energy!

And I, in the front row, was lifted up by their freshness, their joy, the optimistic hope of their future, at the same time that my heart was weighted down by grief and sadness.

To my utter amazement, I was comfortable containing both.