On day fifteen of a grueling drive across thirteen states,
with one hour left to our destination, my husband turned the jeep off onto a
country lane. We had split the kids between our cars and I assumed the one in
his backseat was begging for a potty break. The rollicking greenery falling
away to every side seemed unlikely to offer up a Chevron or a Dunkin Donuts, I
thought. But soon my phone’s map adjusted to show that this was no detour, but
a route, a reward of pastoral cruising to end our Interstate sojourn.
The girls shrieked with unbridled delight. “Up, up, up, up,
up,” they crescendoed up each crest, and down each hill we rolled amid
squealing laughter. Geronimo bubbled over, exclaiming things like, “Look guys,
I can see the whole world!” and “I’m so exciting! I am riding on a chocolate
rainbow!” (This is highest metaphorical praise from a newly four-year-old.)
Songbird added, “It’s exhilarating!”
I couldn’t help but contrast this belly-deep joy with the
dully pacifying effect of trail mix and donuts, solitaire apps and tablet
movies that I had been tossing back at intervals to break up the monotony of
sitting in a five-point harness for 3,474 miles. Those were hits of cotton
candy to this feast, saccharine powder to this fresh summer peach. Something to
numb versus something to enliven.
How much of what is designed for children (or to keep
children unobtrusive) can never sate, but keeps them discontentedly lapping for
more? Here was something that drew in their minds, senses, and imaginations
with a breadth and depth only found in a real, live world.
The saccharine offerings of modernity leech away our joy in
real things because real things are interactive. They require something of us
in response. And though that engagement is itself a joy, the easy passivity of
watching and receiving images is…easier. It lulls little brains with dopamine
hits.
And so it takes radical, daily decisions to protect our
inborn delight in the world from succumbing to the mind-numbing flashes and
bangs coming at us. And so it becomes countercultural to engage delightedly in
the real world and its study; children who play Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter
Raleigh because history thrills them and roll out of bed to do extra math pages
for the joy of accomplishment are weird. And so their interests appear at best
boring, perplexing, and at worst pretentious.
Children and parents who each day choose to revel in
realness are still susceptible to the mindless pleasure of the saccharine. I
love Tennyson and Netflix. My girls love Shakespeare and, heaven help us, Sofia
the First. But when cultivated purposefully, our fickle minds will too crave
the deep satisfaction of the real.
If we can imagine it.
Before we can purpose to transcend the mundane expectations
of our time, the two-dimensional aspirations of GPAs and SATs and a house in
the suburbs and an Employee of the Month plaque, we need to imagine something
radically different. We need to see our Parnassus outlined behind the clouds
before we can try to plant our feet on its base.
When once we have conceived of
those heights, we will see the cycles and stories and relationships of this
world as living metaphors for the wholeness of truth, and we will never again
be content to be lulled into futility. There are mountains to climb.
