Showing Our Work
We had parent-teacher conferences the other week—it turns out that neither of my sons are particularly good at “showing their work,” i.e. demonstrating the underpinnings of their problem-solving. It was a small aside, but interesting to me. It seems like my youngest is shy to show his process, and only wants to reveal a “perfect,” finished result rather than any underlying struggle. My oldest, on the other hand, doesn’t always know how he knows what he knows. I relate to both of them very much.
Culturally, we grapple with the idea of “not-knowing,” wanting always, always, to not only know the answers, but to be affirmed in those answers as well. We expect ourselves and each other to arrive at every juncture fully armed, complete, intact. There is pressure to have an opinion about everything and to hold to it tightly. To double-down. To have no questions, to be resistant to yielding in the face of new information. In fact, we publicly shame politicians for refining, i.e. changing, their thinking over the course of their political careers, and hold them accountable to earlier, less-mature, and less-evolved positions. This inability to change or be changed creates a brittleness and inflexibility that has all of us deeply entrenched, unable to open ourselves to new ways of thinking. When it comes to my youngest son, Sam, who at the tender age of six is not entrenched in anything, I will be encouraging him to adopt my mantra, as it serves me well: I don’t know.
Then, there’s my beloved Max, whose wisdom outpaces his tiny, 50-pound frame. He processes a lot of information—a mind-blowing amount of information—and it is no surprise to me that he cannot always mark the path his brain has traveled to arrive at the solution. This happened frequently to me as a kid—I would intuitively know the answer in math class, sometimes to complex equations, and then have to back-up and do the work to re-solve the problem on paper. I can’t explain how I knew, just that I knew. I think many people can relate to this type of knowing—it’s our intuitive body, wrapped around every cell of our being. And the societal pressure to prove it can destroy the magic. In many ways, this is the (often false) binary between science and spirituality—the two are friends and collaborators, in my opinion—but our culture loves to deny anything that lacks clear proof. I believe that in time, proof to all these existential queries will come—we just don’t yet have the tools to process the imaginal, energetic realm. Just because we can’t prove it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
I wish we all were better at holding space for the process of becoming—of showing each other our work, and of not rejecting things we lack the language to explain. This week, I relistened to my podcast episode with Dolly Chugh, author of A More Just Future. Dolly, to me, is a perfect example of someone who shows her work through her quest to become a better, good-enough-ish person, to probe at her own identity and long-held beliefs about the world, to ask questions that she feels maybe she should already be able to answer. May we all be more like her.
(The other concept I loved from her book and our conversation was the idea of “adventure planning,” or entering into any experience, whether it’s a family vacation or a reckoning with your past, with the idea that the journey will not go as planned. When you’re open and expect strange turns and downsides, it bakes in resilience and flexibility to change course.)