Flexibility, Forgiveness, and a Flying Starfish
“Mr Monk, watch this!” At first, I thought that she (one of my SK students) was going to do a cartwheel. She ran and jumped sideways into the air, her arms were out like a star fish, but she wasn’t quite rotating enough to do one of those hands-free cartwheels that the gymnasts do. She had gotten up into the air, and somehow her body had rotated to be upside down, but it had stopped rotating there, and I was now looking at a little girl, flying upside down, arms and legs out like starfish, smiling like a sea sponge. My heart lurched. Down she came on her neck, and when she hit the ground she bounced like a soccer ball before tumbling over into a seated position. I ran to comfort the now crying girl, who I assumed was gravely injured. I called for first aid, we got her inside and checked her out, and her mom came and picked her up to take her to the hospital. She was back at school the next day.
Little kids are remarkably tough and quick to recover. In the winter, I sometimes give a play-by-play commentary on the various slips and falls we see on the yard, except that I am commenting on what would happen to my colleagues and I if we fell the same way as the kids. “Broken wrist… broken hip… torn groin muscles… paralyzed… dead” I swear, some of the falls would kill me. A lot of it is that the kids are more flexible. But also, they don’t fall with as much weight as adults do.
Kids aren’t just physically flexible; they are mentally and emotionally flexible. I had a student who struggled to “enter play” with other kids. That means that if other kids were playing and he wanted to join, his approach was loud, abrasive, and often destructive. He wanted everything to be his way, and so he would smash what others made so he could take over the play area. If people were playing a game, he would rush in, yelling loud in their faces. He was brilliant, but obviously not “neurotypical” (meaning that he didn’t think like the majority of people think.) At a certain point in the year, he fixated on two girls and basically harassed them. Wherever they went, he ran around in front of them and got into their faces. He tried to grab them both in a bear hug, he tugged at their sleeves, he made loud nonsensical vocalizations in their faces. They tried to get away from him, they tried telling him to stop and leave them alone, but he kept following them. They came to educators for help, and we literally had to pull the guy away for the girls to get some peace. We couldn’t reason with him. His eyes never left the girls, and he didn’t stop trying to reach for them even as we pulled him away. It continued for days. At one point the guy hit one of the girls, hard, in the face, out of the frustration of being rejected. The girl’s parents were so mad that they threatened to call the police.
We, the educators, can’t lock kids in a cage. We couldn’t incarcerate the guy. In cases like that we have to stay close to the kid, monitor every situation, and try to guide/steer them towards appropriate behaviour. That is what we did with that guy. We kept him away from those two girls for a while. Often it meant that I had to shuffle my feet, like a basketball player on defense, to keep my body between him and them.
As expected, the girls were on alert anytime the guy was nearby. But over time, (not a very long time) they must have watched the guy enough to realize that he wasn’t truly malicious. Somehow, they saw innocence in him, even at a time when the educators were struggling to find compassion for him. If an adult man had behaved the same way towards an adult woman (let alone two), and there had been witnesses, the police would have been involved, and he would have been locked up. If there had not been witnesses, then it would have been harder to prove, but one thing is for sure: the woman would label the guy as a jerk (rightfully so), a creep (matches the description) and they probably would have avoided him for the rest of their life (with good cause.) But in this case, after only a week or two, the girls somehow got over their anger and fear, and they started giving the guy a chance. First, they tolerated him playing near them. Then they allowed him to play beside them. And then one day I saw the boy and the girl who had been hit in the face, playing together in the sandbox. They were actually working together, using bowls and kitchen utensils to make a structure out of the sand. I said, in surprise, “It is so nice to see you to working together so well!” The little girl looked at me and said, nonchalantly, “We’re friends now.”
My Guru said that children are closest to God. Yes, they are flexible. Not only are they physically flexible but their minds are still creating new neuropathways, allowing them to think in new ways all the time. They are not at all stuck in their ways like adults. I mentioned that they fall with less weight. That could be an analogy for the ego. With their egos being less established, they don’t take as much offense, and they get over things quicker. But maybe it is more than that. Maybe they are literally closer to God. Maybe their consciousness (their ways of thinking and feeling) more closely resembles the consciousness of God than our adult consciousness. Those two little girls forgave and accepted the guy faster than we, the educators, did. And we weren’t even the real victims of his behaviour.
A mini kindergarten miracle happened after that day. Once those girls forgave and accepted the guy, he dropped his fixation with them. I realized that he was fixated on them because he wanted to be accepted and approved by them, and he couldn’t get over the rejection. Over the course of that year, we realized that when at least some of the students accepted that guy and regarded him like a friend, he behaved well and was easy to work with. But when his behaviour wore out everyone’s nerves and they started telling him to go away all the time, he became extremely hard to work with, to the point that an adult had to literally be within arm’s length of him at all times, usually in a one-on-one setting*. It showed that the guy, deep down, just wanted to be accepted and loved. Yes, he wanted everything to be about him. He wanted it all to be his way, on his schedule, with him in control. But his strongest desire was to be loved and accepted. That is a comforting thought: the deepest and strongest desire in people is not for control, recognition, wealth, or anything else. The strongest desire, at the root of everything else, is the desire to be loved and accepted. And it took a pure hearted child to show me that.
* This is an example of “negative attention seeking”, where a kid will act out just because it gets them attention from an adult. Sometimes they go to extremes of noise/violence so that they end up in one-on-one situations with an adult, which, I think, is what they crave.