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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday February 5, 2001 Volume III Number 6 |
FOCUS - The Kid in You
Psychologists talk about the inner child - the remnant of childhood that lingers on in us adults. The general idea is that adulthood somehow overlays the bright eyed wonderment of childhood, and covers up, or maybe even buries the very qualities that “maturity” so desperately needs.
Self-help books and tapes encourage us to peel back the layers and rediscover the child within. Us tough guys aren’t quite sure what that means, but it sounds pretty good. You remember the kid stuff - the innocence of those early days when the world seemed to be a safe place where caterpillars spun cocoons and transformed themselves into butterflies that flittered from flower to flower and magnifying glasses could focus sunlight into a laser beam of hot light and turn dry leaves into flaming torches and a pesky dog was your best friend and the whole neighborhood looked different from the highest branch in the tree and model airplanes could really fly and bikes picked up speed on the downhill and the wind made a rushing noise over your ears and there was always a secret place to hide out there in the bushes where no one could find you.
And it didn’t matter if your sentences ran on and on.
Us guys get lots of advice from those perky perennially happy and blow-dried experts who just wrote a book suggesting that what we really need is to call up those childhood experiences and free ourselves up to let the world speak to us again in those wonderfully uncomplicated ways. (They also tell us guys to get in touch with our feminine side – whatever that means. I’ve always wondered why women shouldn’t be encouraged, in the same way, to get in touch with their masculine side.) It’s true; we get caught in our grown up “issues.” They are demanding. Complicated. Relentless. Unforgiving. Irreversible. Binding. Exhausting.
We need a break.
Maybe we need to take a look at life through the eyes of a child. Maybe that’s why we are so fascinated by little children. Maybe they do have something to teach us.
So imagine what might happen if you could somehow have a face-to-face encounter with the child you were at age eight. What if you could have a conversation? What advice would you give to that third grader? If you were age eight and you could see yourself as you are today, what might you think of what you have become?
* * * * * *
We’ve been talking about it now for months. Maybe a year. We finally did it.
We cleaned out the garage.
The people at the Thrift Store are good-natured about it. They don’t seem to complain. The stuff we bring over there probably ought to go to the landfill for a proper burial. But they take it, and thank us. It’s nice to think that maybe it will be recycled and someone somewhere just might find the discarded stuff useful.
This time, the cleaning of the garage turned out to be an exercise in nostalgia.
All three of our children are gone now; one married and two away in college. Our daughter is finishing up her work on a college campus two thousand miles away. Our son, the youngest, is taking the second semester of this sophomore year in a study abroad program in a little village along the Rhine River in Switzerland.
(Kevin made an international telephone call just this week with the news that on the soccer field, he wrenched his knee. And he’s wondering what he needs to show as evidence of insurance in the emergency room of the hospital just down the road in this “foreign” land. Even though he’s age twenty, it’s hard to be so far away. Nine hours on the clock. We miss him.)
So the garage, for some time now, has been a collection point for stuff. Lots of stuff. We’ve let it pile up out there, thinking, I guess, that the kids just might want to play with that stuff when they come home.
There were a couple pair of roller blades, all scuffed up with worn down wheels and knotted laces. And knee pads, and elbow pads and a scratched up helmet and we remembered telling Kevin that the equipment was mandatory anytime he went out there to “blade” as he called it then, or jumped on one of those now banged up skate boards leaning against the wall.
In a big blue tub we used as a toy bin, we found several deflated balls. One the leather soccer ball Kristyn used at age seven when she ran up and down the field in that herd of other second graders chasing after the black and white ball, kicking it on the run. Us parents screamed encouragement from the sidelines, jumping up and down and high-fiving each other if and when that ball made its way into the goal. Now the ball in the garage is flat. I don’t quite know why, but I pumped it up again, just to see if it would hold air.
Same with two NJB basketballs. Green, blue and white. Both of ‘em, flat. Not because they sprung a leak. It’s just the passing of time. Ultimately air gets through rubber. I pumped them up, too, and as I did I remembered the hours at the high school gym, when I coached those little boys. And they did what I told them. Learning to dribble the ball, and pass to the open man, and fast break on the steal, and set a pick, and hit the free throw. And when we’d win, the parents thought I had something to do with it. If we lost, they thought the same.
Then, we unzipped the big green All Star tote bag and found a treasury of old memorabilia. The regulation baseball pants, marked up when the fly ball, just beyond reach, required a diving catch and knees skidding through the green grass for a couple of feet left a near permanent stain. And the slide into home base left its mark, too. These are the traces of battle weary baseball players whose marked up pants distinguished them from the others who sat on the bench and went home clean. And in that green bag in the garage, we found the metal bat, and the hardened glove with the name KEVIN KEMP in permanent black ink on the leather and a ball or two. And then the shoes with steel cleats, now way small for Kevin’s oversized feet, and a plastic bag of spare cleats, just in case the originals wore down. And as we inspected the contents of the nylon All-Star bag with the bright yellow shoulder strap, we thought about those hours in the bleachers when we kept track of every pitch, every throw, every crack of the bat, every call by the ump, and we’d pile into the car afterwards and make speeches about sportsmanship and the life-lessons learned about there on the diamond and sometimes we’d laugh and relive an awesome play… and then other times, the ride home was pretty quiet. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Kevin would say. “That’s OK, honey” Carolyn would reply, and then she’d look at me and smile. I’d get the point. And keep my mouth shut.
Out there in the garage, we found hockey sticks. And radios. And a box full of wires and adapters and the crib is still there, too. The one all three slept in… it’s made the rounds with brothers and sisters whose children also slept in there… and now it’s made its way back into our garage, waiting to be used again, I suppose.
Maybe… well, you know. One of these days, we’ll find a place for that crib. It’s not going to the Thrift Store. It stays put.
* * * * * * *
When Russ Duritz, “image consultant,” meets a chubby eight-year-old, he’s in for a major surprise.
Duritz, near forty, is single, successful, fit. He’s made a career of looking good. When a public figure – a politician, a professional athlete, a corporate executive, a television anchorperson – needs to polish up the public image, or respond to a media crisis of some sort, Russ Duritz is called in.
He lives out his own advice. He’s compulsive about exercise and nutrition. He’s got all the toys, a sterile mansion chromed and glassed and tastefully decorated, and a Porsche Turbo. He never stops working. His cell strapped to his belt, his headset a permanent fixture; he barks orders to his personal assistant in the middle of the night. She takes notes. She’s loyal.
He can’t stop.
The big house has room for only one. Him.
Russ finds the little boy, well, disgusting. Annoying. He’s got a million questions. He wants a dog. He eats all the wrong food. His hair looks like a mop. He’s withdrawn from other kids… he watches too much TV.
And then Russ discovers, the kid is he.
Russ Duritz is looking at the kid he was at age eight. No mistake about it. It’s a thirty year time warp. Russ becomes an unwilling companion to the little guy he was – way back when.
It’s the one thing that cracks open the patterns that are causing him to become a rich, powerful, famous and desperately unhappy man. He is alone.
Until the little boy in him comes back.
* * * * * * *
For two millennia now the teaching of Jesus has intrigued students of the Bible. He taught his followers that true faith, the kind of faith that really counts is the faith of a child.
The idea is that adulthood complicates matters. It obfuscates. It clouds over then fogs in simple realities, until they are hardly recognizable.
We have trouble with simple faith. We want proof. We want to see the evidence. We put it on hold; we want to give it the test of time. We hesitate. Then we wait. We analyze. We want confirmation from an independent third party. And sometimes, we are cynical about faith. We don’t believe our eyes anymore. We don’t want shattered expectations, so we lower the bar. We watch from the sidelines, from the bleachers, where it’s safe. And no one gets hurt. We sit in the back row of life.
Jesus liked the faith he saw in the eyes of a child. The wide eyes. The eager expectation. The jumping for joy. The giggles. The ready and easy embrace of a simple truth.
The faith of a child.
* * * * * * *
Bruce
Willis plays the part of Russ Duritz and young Spencer Breslin plays Rusty
Duritz in the new Frank Masi film, “Disney’s The Kid.”
It’s a curious fantasy, and raises some interesting questions.
After all these years, what have we become? Certainly
not what we thought we might be in those grade school days.
Our Sunday morning speaker asked (coincidentally), “How many people in the room are doing exactly what you THOUGHT you would be doing when you were in grade school?”
Two raised their hands. Out of two hundred.
Young Rusty exclaims, “What? I don’t get to be a PILOT? And I’m not MARRIED? And I don’t even have a DOG?!”
Russ looks puzzled. But only for a moment. Because he remembers those dreams. They got lost somewhere while consulting image.
* * * * * * *
Once again, it’s another Monday. Your world is stacked up with adult issues. But maybe somewhere deep down, you sense a restlessness about it all. You know there’s something more… but you’re not sure what.
Take a minute to close your eyes and remember the person you were between age eight and ten. Call to memory one of those faded photographs that captured that little kid on film. Think about your house, where you lived. How you spent those afternoons after school, what you thought about. Your pals. The bully down the street. The teacher who introduced you to a big wide world. The smell of the grass in springtime.
Some of the memories may be painful. Others fun. Have a little talk with yourself. Tell that grade-schooler what you’ve become. Let the grade-schooler remind you of the things that were important to you then.
Let those things be important to you once more.
You are a leader. You may well be takin’ things a little too seriously.
Lighten up. Have the faith of a little child.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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