“When I was young I asked my mother, ‘What will I be’”
Doris Day Que Sera, Sera
We were sitting at the dinner table tonight, eating our Paleo meal of fried whiting, avocado, callaloo (Trinidadian dish), and plantains (roots and tubers are kind of ok), when my son asked what I thought he could be when he grew up. After singing a couple of bars of the song (no one was shocked since I have it on my IPod) I explained that I was was more interested in who he could be.
At 9, he already has peers and others giving him strong hints about their expectations for how he’s supposed to fit in. Dinner time is the perfect time to instill in him his responsibility to be a positive deviant.
Happiness is our natural condition. All you have to do is look at a healthy infant to notice that their default state is one of unfiltered joy. As we grow older, we learn to add to our list of needs. Our wants and needs become confused. Eventually, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”
Our attention has become fractured. We are losing our ability to intuit. We seek increasing stimulation from external sources. When the stimulation is no longer present, when we feel we are not able to meet our “needs,” we pick up the pace or become despondent.
We have to create opportunities for silence – periods of meditation where God speaks to us. This will aid us in understanding our points of individuality and our points of connection. Before we can value our differences, we must accept the things that we have in common. This begins when we seek the answer to the question: “Who am I and why I am here?” I believe that an honest effort to answer that question will prevent the moral nihilism that too many people organize their lives around.
We have the tools for happiness. They can only be accessed when we strip away the extra. They are only effective when we are honest about all the parts that make us who we are. Only then can we discover and work with our real strengths. The world has need of our gifts. They can only be given when we engage in addition by subtraction.
Albert Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems at the same level of consciousness at which we created them.” Yet this is exactly what we do in our efforts at educational reform. There continue to be dueling reports about whether charter schools work any better for underprivileged kids than the regular school system. From what I can tell, this is only a discussion about the best form of palliative care.
I go back and forth on why we do what we do with our children and their education. Is it a desire for social and economic control by our oligarchs? Is it greed? Is it a lack of imagination? A combination, or something else entirely?
This affects us all and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
“When I was young I asked my mother, ‘What will I be’” 
