Creativity and the Woods

My childhood home was a relatively typical post-World War II American suburb of tract houses, the only difference being that it was suburban New Orleans, and the surnames occupying the tract houses were a dizzying array of English, Irish, Italian, French, Spanish, American South and American Yankee.

The neighborhood was living proof that there was an American Baby Boom. If you weren’t part of the Boom, or didn’t have a hand in creating it, you can’t imagine what Halloween was like – hundreds and hundreds of children pouring over the streets like an animated, costumed tidal wave. Or how crowded public and parochial schools could be.

Suffice it to say there was never a problem finding a friend to play with, or assembling more than enough players for two full sandlot baseball teams or street football teams.

Behind the houses across the street from ours was a remnant of what the entire area had once been – a low-lying forest on land just high enough to avoid the name “swamp forest.” For a few years, we called it simply “The woods” – until rumors came along of an even large tract several more blocks away. Then our tract became “The Little Woods,” differentiated from “The Big Woods.” Surrounding subdivisions, some older than World War II, provided something of a civilized buffer, but both wooded areas were places of magic and mystery.

Our parents didn’t seem to mind us playing there. All of the critters had departed, with the exception of squirrels, birds, lizards and occasional snakes. Nothing terrible had ever happened there; there were no stories of ghosts or someone’s body being found. So all we had to say to our mothers was “going to the woods with the kids” and they’d nod in understanding and acquiescence.

The woods, without old stories or rumors attached them, became a blank slate for scores of imaginations. They were the setting for countless games of hide and seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war, and reenacting favorite movies and television shows (“What now, Kimosabe?”). We found mysteries to solve – who left that old jacket and baseball cap? Who built that campfire? Could someone be living in our woods? If we couldn’t solve the mystery, we’d invent a story and make up our own solution.

The woods, little and big, were a place for kids to be kids, to exercise imagination and creativity, to come up with nonsense, to climb trees and pretend they were lookout posts to watch for the enemy. We’d make camouflage blinds to hide in, and set traps for enemy soldiers.

Those woods, and the creativity they afforded, were a gift.

“Creativity is a gift from God to be submitted to Him,” says Ann Kroeker in Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families. “He can use it as a powerful tool for learning, growth, and understanding. Bright, inquisitive, childlike minds are so open to God’s revelation. He gives our children the ability to think, wonder, and question.”

Both tracts of woods are long gone, converted to yet more subdivisions. It’s inevitable, I suppose.

But what a blessing it was to have had them.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Not So Fast. Today concludes the discussion, and you can see what people have to say about the book by visiting the site.

Photograph by David Wagner via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I posted a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday, or even had an update on my most favorite of subjects: The Grandsons!

Cameron has now turned three. A couple of weeks ago, while Janet was out of town visiting her mother, I went over to the son and daughter-in-law’s house for dinner. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now: Cameron owns his grandfather.

And then Caden, almost one, crawling, standing and climbing, watching everything with a slightly suspicious look (“Do I know you? Are you sure?”), following Cameron and his grandfather into Cameron’s bedroom – to fix the Brio toy set, play with stuffed animals, play hide and seek, whatever Cameron can come up with (and he comes up with a lot).

Caden startled his mother the other day when she found sitting on Cameron’s trampoline. And then on the fireplace hearth. It’s called batten-down-the-hatches time.

Since mid-February, work has been intense. I should write that in all capital letters. Crisis after crisis are blending together into a rather large ongoing crisis mishmash. One day I found myself tweeting about three different crises at the same time, and I had to focus to slowly check each tweet to make sure I was tweeting the right one at any given moment.

Factoid: I’ve now read 69 books on the Amazon Kindle.

The crises at work means I’m generally reading less, but I am still reading. Currently that means the World War II suspense novel Winner Lose All by William Brown; Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge for the Tweetspeak Poetry book discussion; Not So Fast by Ann Kroeker for the High Calling book discussion; and The Grace of God by Andy Stanley for what I call the Jason-Sarah Wednesday book discussion.

Waiting patiently to be read are Lapse Americana: Poems by Benjamin Myers, which just arrived this week; Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca; and My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman.

If the weather cooperates, I hope to get on the bike this weekend. Several people have asked me about my bike ride Wildlife Reports I post on Facebook after each ride. I list the numbers and kinds of wildlife I encounter while riding, in descending evolutionary order: horses, dogs, cats, birds, roller bladders, and bikers talking on their cell phones.

Factoid: Longest bike ride I’ve ever done: 93 miles, from Boonville, Missouri, to Hermann, Missouri, on the Katy Trail. Shortest bike ride I’ve ever done: three blocks from my house (my very first ride when I started biking; it was almost physical collapse).

I’m still working with my personal trainer. That means I’m still doing exercises with exotic names like cat’n’camel, bear crawl, scorpion, and dead bug. My un-favorite is the dead bug, epically when I have to put 10-pound weights on my ankles and lift a 10-pound medicine ball from my feet to my hands. And while I’m lying on the floor. They don’t call it Dead Bug for nothing.

Photographs of Cameron and Caden Young by their mother, Stephanie Young.

Traditions: More than Holidays

From the time I was six or seven until well into high school, my family’s home was where most of my mother’s family gathered for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. It wasn’t that we had the largest house to accommodate assorted aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends and my grandmother. But our house had the largest space available for the tables – a large screened porch which was eventually enclosed to become a den. (Even in New Orleans, Christmas could be on the cool side.)

For a time, one very long table was sufficient to handle the family. Then a card table was added to handle the growing children. And then another. Eventually, two long tables were needed.

My parents prepared most of the food, and I think this was the cause of the demise of the gatherings. As they got older, it became too much work, and the gatherings had ended by the time I had graduated from high school.

But, for the child that was me, the gatherings were great fun and eagerly anticipated – noise, laughter, the occasional argument, the food and desserts, playing with my cousins. It was a tradition even before I knew what that meant. (A related one was the gathering of family and friends at my father’s business in downtown New Orleans on Mardi Gras day – a place to escape the crowds and find a bathroom.)

We grew up; the family scattered in various places around the South; one of us moved way up north to St. Louis. The tradition of the big gatherings at holiday times fractured into small fathers celebrating with themselves.

For a time, my wife and I spent long hours in the car, going back and forth to Shreveport or New Orleans for holidays, until we decided we had to have our own traditions for our two boys.

One tradition started in December, 1985: the baking of the Christmas bread. A local grocery store had a monthly magazine about food and recipes, and that year had a recipe for Christmas Wreath Bread. I was in the bread-baking habit back then, and so I decided to make it. It was a hit with the family – most likely because of the filling: chopped cranberries, pecans, butter, sugar, and spices, which any of us would be glad to eat straight without the bread.

I’ve made the bread every Christmas since then, with the exception of 2006, when we spent the holiday with my oldest son in Phoenix (and met the future daughter-in-law). But 27 years and only one excused miss counts as a tradition, I think.

In Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families, Ann Kroeker argues for the observance of family traditions, and more than traditions at only the major holidays. Traditions like family board game night, or the birthday honoree getting to choose the menu for all meals for the day, or annual vacations with family to the same place. These are the things that not only glue families together; these are the things which come to express the meaning of family.

Consider your family when you were growing up, and your family now. What traditions can you remember, and what traditions are important?

Over at The HighCalling during April, we’re discussing Not So Fast. To see where this week’s discussion is, and what others are posting about, please visit The HighCalling.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Following a tunnel to the sea

The tunnel system underneath our campus at work stretches for about six blocks. It doesn’t follow a straight line; it bends and curves and angles to accommodate the placement of buildings and both the topography and geology. It’s not entirely underground; part of runs alongside an extended bank of windows, and part of it becomes an extended walkway over a street. But we call it the tunnel. And it affords protection against bad weather, a place to stand during tornado drills (or the real thing), and a comfortable way to reach other buildings during rain or snow.

This day, it is largely empty. It’s a fine day outside, and the middle of the afternoon. This day, at this time, I’ve chosen to walk the tunnel. I feel almost compelled to.

Work this day is intense, crisis-ridden, filled with politics and missed opportunities. I have worked straight through lunch; the work keeps mounting, and mounding, up.

And so I do what Ann Kroeker suggests in Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families. And that is to take a walk, breaking the pattern of ever increasing work frenzy and breaking it deliberately.

And so I walk the tunnel. I know I won’t come across very many people, and likely no one I know. 

My building sits at about the center of the tunnel system. Walk in one direction, and I’ll end up where the staff functions are housed or veer to the left and walk with the buildings housing the commercial businesses. Or I can go in the other direction, in the direction of the large complex of buildings for our research and technology organization. Perhaps the position of my building is symbolic – where the flow of research and business and staff functions converge, a physical nexus of the company’s headquarters.

I reach the tunnel and the bottom of the stairs, and turn toward the research complex. The tunnel is deserted; I hear only the echoes of my own footsteps. I pass no one. It’s a quiet walk, and I find myself listening.

Be still.

Calm your spirit.

Rest your soul.

Walk, and walk toward me.

As I walk, my mind begins to empty of work, looming crises, conflicts and tensions. As I walk along the windowed wall of this part of the tunnel, I can see mid-afternoon sunshine lighting the grass and trees along the ground sloping away from the tunnel before it moves sharply upward into a hill. It’s windy, and the trees are filtering the light, creating a shimmering effect on the ground and grass.

Be still.

Listen.

Unexpectedly, I find myself on a shimmering Sea of Galilee. It’s mid-day, too late for fishing, the boat must be moving from one side of the lake to the other. I am one of a group of people watching the waves, feeling the wind, hearing the sounds of the water and birds and someone talking.

And I listen, to what’s being taught on the boat.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Not So Fast. Visit the site and take a look at what other people are talking (and blogging) about.

Photograph by Tom Leeds via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Plea for Childhood, AND Adulthood

I am talking with a friend who is nearly at his wit’s end.

“My team at work is grossly under-resourced,” he says. “It’s wiping us out physically and emotionally. I’m begging for help, and management turns its face away.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Triage,” he says. “It’s all we can do. Triage. Some things just won’t get done. I’ll be blamed if things blow up, but I can’t work my people to death.”

We talk about what triage means. Simply translated: if no crises erupt, they will eke by if they do the bare minimum. There’s just too much of the “bare minimum.”

Given the business his company is in, a crisis is inevitable.

He’s also keeping a record.

In Not So Fat: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families, author Ann Kroeker says we need to allow our children to have a childhood. We need to stop overscheduling and overpreparing them to meet the world’s standard for success, if for no other reason that we’re setting the stage for their ultimate failure.

I have a corollary. We need to allow adults to have an adulthood, too. We need to stop piling work on people already grossly overworked.

This isn’t a new problem. More than a hundred years ago, Mark Twain observed that it was characteristically American for businessmen to always try to get by shorthanded.

Millions of people have quite the labor force in despair over finding employment, while millions more face chronic overwork. Both create massive stresses and pressures on families.

No, the problem isn’t new. But it has an urgency today, because the family is under siege like it’s never been before.

We can make a choice to slow the frenzy down for our children. And we need to start talking about how to slow down the frenzy in the workplace. If I had a magic wand about overwork, I'd wave it. But we need to start talking about it.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Not So Fast each Monday in April. Today, Seth Haines is leading the discussion, so head over there to see what’s happening.

Not So Fast!

I grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a suburb of New Orleans. I was one of tens of millions of Baby Boomers, that demographic cohort that overwhelmed hospitals, elementary and high schools, and eventually universities. There wasn’t much we didn’t overwhelm, simply by the sheer force of numbers. And we’ll soon be overwhelming retirement homes, funeral homes and cemeteries.

Life seemed simpler and it seemed safer. The vast majority of our mothers worked at home, while our fathers worked elsewhere. I was six when my mother let me ride my bike by myself a little over a mile to the dime store. We had no organized sport leagues staffed by fanatical parents; we organized our own open field baseball games and street football games. A nearby woods afforded ample opportunities for exploration, games, and adventure (real and created).

Life seemed slower then because life was slower then. We had television, but it was mostly on for an hour after school (local kids show followed by the Mickey Mouse Club)a few favorite programs on Friday night and Saturday cartoons. And we preferred the big screen to the small screen – 25 cents for a matinee. We’d even take the bus to a theater that was too far to walk – by ourselves; by eight years old I had already learned the bus system.

And there were books, board games, and playacting. We’d dream up stories to act, often using the woods for the setting. War games, usually, or cowboys and Indians.

By the time I was married with my own children, life had changed. My kids were part of the Baby Boomlet – the children of the Boomers. Between my childhood and theirs, sports leagues had developed – basketball, baseball, fall baseball, and soccer (football was left to the high schools). And church activities. Busy-ness was taking hold. The advent of the internet and electronic games adding to the speeding up.

Today, I read what parents do, how organized and scheduled everything is for children (not to mention their parents), and I worry for my grandchildren and their generation.

Our children need to be allowed to be children. If Harvard requires your child find a cure for cancer as an admission requirement, then there are worse things than not getting into Harvard (and likely less of a student load debt). Not every child needs to be in three baseball leagues, dance ensembles, and 14 after-school activities. No one needs to create a child’s imagination for him or her; they’re usually inventive enough to figure out things for themselves.

Over at The High Calling today, Laura Boggess is starting a book discussion on Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families, by Ann Kroeker. It couldn’t be more timely. I’ve read the first four chapters, and I think Ann has something important to say to all of us – with practical ways to start removing some of the busy-ness from our lives.

All of us – parents, children, grandparents – need to make a conscious decision to live our lives differently, more slowly, with more forethought and less anxiety, even if it means we don’t fare so well in the competition we maintain with everyone else.

Our children – and grandchildren – will be the beneficiaries.

Please visit the discussion at The HighCalling. It’s important.

Photograph: Author Ann Kroeker overlooking the Frio River at Laity Lodge near Kerrville, Texas, by Jennifer Dukes-Lee. Laity Lodge is becoming known as Rivendell on the Frio.