I like to play sports (softball, basketball, flag football), sometimes run, enjoy things like planting things and sometimes harvesting them, and very much like to walk around places like zoos and museums. I am a fairly active person, or rather I was a fairly active person before kids, and I don’t do these things because I have to but rather because I want to. I totally understand as I watch my kids run around and play and be loud because I, myself, like to run around and play and be loud. I am a loud person.
But when I think on the things that I like to do most, they almost always are involve sitting quietly for long periods of time. Reading, my most favorite of all, is a total quiet, confined to yourself time. And I can read for a long time. A very long time. I could read for the whole weekend if the kids would allow it.
But it is the other things I do and enjoy doing that are like that as well, like playing on the computer. Now, I have severely curtailed any computer games for quite some time now, and it has been absolute months since I even jumped into one of them on my computer, but I still have a sordid love affair with good and complex computer games. This love, though, knows that my heart belongs to too many other things and so goes off to sate its emptiness with others, hoping one day I will change my mind. I will not. (I’m not an online game guy and never have been, so it has never been THAT bad.) Again, note here the long periods of time sitting quietly with myself concentrating.
Playing music is sitting ‘quietly’ by myself concentrating. Learning a language, same thing. Listening to music, same thing. Reading, writing, and collecting data as a
scientician, same thing. Sullenly crying to myself in despair of my situation, same.....oh, wait my mom will probably take that seriously and call me (“Damon, I read what you wrote on the blog and almost cried!”) But you get the drift, I can be an active and social person, but most things I like to do are just me with some quiet alone time.
No, this
isn’t a meditation on the horror that kids bring upon a life of quiet contemplation. Years later I can finally get some time to myself to do that type of stuff, so my complaints about such are somewhat abated. But, it makes me wonder about how I go about sharing these favorite distractions of mine with the children. It is easier with music and instruments as we can play together and possibly I can give some instruction (more so suggestions, as the worst a parent can be is someone approximating a harsh teacher, as exemplified by the undoubtedly home-school family a few houses down), and also language is easily sharable, as both
Kestian and Adelaide frequently ask about how to say things in Italian (I can only help as much as I can considering that I am at best a second year high school student in my competency). But what of reading?
I imagine my worry is not so much enjoying such solitude activities with them (as however you can resolve that contradiction), but how I can get them to understand and embrace them. The joy in guitar, reading, language, whichever is that it is only you and your own desire and wits that intertwine with your book or instrument and this gives you a basic understanding of it. Yeah, that sounded new
wavey and shoddily stated, but when I learn and play a song on my mandolin by myself, I actually discover the song and understand it in a way that I can only explain as something that makes your clarity and intellect surge. Same with all those others. It is the personal quiet and almost meditative times by yourself with these activities where you achieve progress and real learning.
My worry, then, lies in the fact that my
Kestian and Adelaide are almost always together or with us and don’t really have much practice to just be quiet by themselves in the corner and do something. Why would they, since they have a playmate there who they like? This, though, is beyond any individual bonding with us, but more of individual bonding with themselves. When I was growing up I walked a lot, almost everywhere. This was, of course, due to our being working poor (I’m using that term since it was on
Wikipedia under the article about social class) and rarely having a car and, when we did, never did I have access to it. I never disliked this, however, because walking everywhere gave me time to be with myself, be alone with my thoughts, and actually get to know me.
The kids are only four and will have plenty of time to have alone time in their life, yeah I know. But if I started to show them how to strum some stuff on ukulele, would they know to sit and practice that or play around with that by themselves? Of course not, they are too young. Right? When do I start worrying about this?
I have little doubt that they will be more than happy to sit quietly and read or whatever for hours when they get older, and that will be the time when I will bitterly miss the happy screams of them as they run around the house being overly playful and never quiet. Currently, however, the incessantly frenetic scamps make me dream for the time where we can all sit quietly and do our own things. Right now it seems like they will always be like that, and though I know they won’t, it worries me that they might not be the well behaved intellectual types (a phrase my brother once asked me, in derision, if that is what I want my children to be like. I do).
Also, I can really tell the types of books I am reading by the style of my writing.
