There is a small park in the town where I live.
The grass area is maintained by the council and the boarders are gardened by volunteers.
In its own way it is a bit of an oasis. Children run free from the prospect of treading in dog faeces as there are no dog allowed. There is a sandpit and a wooden play structure that would pass as a tiny home in some communities, trees, shade, grass and an extensive garden of herbs and berries.
A local primary school is located very near. Just across the road in fact.
Pre lockdown it was not uncommon to find a troop of children in high vis apparel visiting the plants and bugs there, sat in circles, while teachers with clip boards ticked off whole swaths of Ofsted goals in a single sitting.
On one occasion, such a group arrived while I was there with my son, who was playing with a friend.
The teacher, somewhat over bearing and officious, handed out an assignment. I could feel her pressing the button internally on a stopwatch somewhere on the inside.
“I want you to draw a map of the garden.”
This was the base of the instruction.
One of the children close to where I was sitting began to explain to a classmate that they were going to make a map of the inside of their shoe. Although they did not articulate it directly as such, it sounded to me as if they were wanting to map the sensations they were experiencing inside their shoe by using the images that they anticipated finding in the garden. They spoke of the bugs that lived at the toe, the lawn on the sole and the flowers that reached out of the heel.
It was imaginative, quirky, surreal, and eccentric.
The teaching assistant, on overhearing the child, began berating them in what was really a humiliating display. The child knew that silence was what was required of them. At the same time their spirit was far from broken. This child was in it for the long haul. At least that was the sense I got at the time. This was some years ago and I am pleased to say that my perceptions proved to be true. All the same, it was unpleasant to watch.
Before they left, the child, who sensed my presence there, turn to look. I shrugged and smiled as if to say “what was her problem”. He smiled. Perhaps in appreciation of being witnessed.
If we are to survive as a species it most likely has something to do with being able to map our shoes when asked only to conform to official targets for productivity.
This is what a healthy soul does, at least at one level. Without doing harm to others, without complying to imposition, it follows its own light, and finds it’s own conclusion.
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Worth remembering there is usually many more than one “correct” answer or response to any question or situation.
Very true.
And also, so often, there are those choices that are choiceless too, because they appear as the most obvious choice to make – the no brainer – because they do not require thought.
And yes, these can be the product of thoughtless assumptions, but this is not the quality of choicelessness of which I am thinking. Rather than they are the choiceless choices that are made as the result of being as present as one can be with the moment and all of the facts – or truths (although I realise that such a word comes with its own questions) – that it contains.