Monthly Archives: April 2023

How Not to Receive a Gift

Imagine that we each have just received a free and mysterious gift – one that, when explored, grew more and more wonderful.

Here is a list (not exhaustive!) of how I should probably not receive this gift.

-Convince myself it is not that cool anyway, and not really engage it.

-Try to subtly earn it, and thereby convince myself that I control the gift.

-Trash it.

-Tell myself that I do not deserve it, and thereby excuse myself from encountering the wonder of the thing.

-Otherwise ignore or neglect it.

I’d be silly to do these things, right?  

And yet I know that I have, in one form or another, with the free gifts of my inner life, outer life, the earth, my mind and body.

Let’s agree to receive these gifts in wonder and, humbled by their depth, attend to each with deep love.

The Way We Play

I once heard this story of a student auditioning at a school of music.  

He had exhaustively prepared his audition piece.  During the actual audition, though, the instructor interrupted him almost immediately and asked him to play it differently.

That’s great.  Now, play it at double speed.

Now, play it at half speed.

Now, play it like Adele sings. 

Now play it like Santana.

Now play it like Dylan.

The teacher wanted to see how well the student adapted to the challenge of changing his default mode.

In life, we typically have a default “way we play.”  Call it our personality, or our narrative, or our way of being.  It has helped us survive this long and do some things well.

Crucial to the skill of living artfully, though, is beginning to see this “way we play” as limited, learn to experiment with playing differently, and then watch new doors open wide.

Playing to Learn

The few times that I have shadowed our sons in their (mostly German-speaking) school, I’ve gained an appreciation of how difficult it must be to be immersed in a new language in that context. Yes, young brains can pick up language fast, but going from zero to playground proficient is still a hard thing.

Lately, at home, we have noticed that they are most likely to practice their German when they are playing. Either alone or together, they play with both toys and language. They get in a lot of hours of practice that way and the German becomes part of their joy.

So: that new thing we want (or need) to learn… how can our learning feel like play?

Elders

When we moved into our house last summer, I found that someone had left an unassuming book in the dresser… an independently published book, “20 Walks from Munich.” Each of the twenty walks is exhaustively (and often hilariously) detailed, like a pirate map in a children’s story. (As in: “Look to the left. Do you see the big rock? Walk past it and turn right.”)

When I tried out the first walk, I was looking up and down from the book every few minutes. I was a novice and wondered often if I was on the correct path. But the more I walked, the more I saw folks in their sixties and seventies in small groups on the very path that my book was describing.

They knew the way by heart.

I put away the book and followed where they were walking.

Our modern life typically does not prioritize listening to elders, but it could and, in many cases, should. The elders have walked this way before.