Living and Dying in the Moment: It is Said that The Coward Dies One Thousand Deaths

Living and Dying in the Moment

(or It is Said that The Coward Dies One Thousand Deaths)

by

Duane Sharrock

The Humunga-Halfpipe at Splashdown Beach

http://www.splashdownbeach.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/humunga-halfpipe-5.jpg

I am administrator in an alternative high school, so I have goals for my son and daughter that are informed by my experiences there. Among the many things I want for my children, I want them to develop resilience (which includes perseverance) in addition to the other success-driving habits of mind. If they possess them, they can succeed in general education and beyond. I want them to be college and career ready, but I also want them to be ready for positive life experiences.

Fostering Resilience

Some people are familiar with the term resilience. The problem is, they usually see it as a have-or-have-not kind of ability, much like creativity and leadership. It is not. Not only are researchers suggesting now that creativity and leadership can be learned, they also reveal that creativity, leadership, and resilience are all related. If you don’t believe me, check out the recent literature and research on these subjects. Especially here, here, and here. Leadership and creativity share similar factors and require similar skills. Resilience, which includes persistence and self-efficacy also include other factors:

“Studies show that there are several factors which develop and sustain a person’s resilience:[25]

1. The ability to make realistic plans and being capable of taking the steps necessary to follow through with them
2. A positive self-concept and confidence in one’s strengths and abilities
3. Communication and problem-solving skills
4. The ability to manage strong impulses and feelings

“These factors are not necessarily inherited; they can be developed in any individual and they promote resilience.” They are observed in creatives as well as in leaders.

The other thing people should learn is that resilience emerges from personal experiences, relationships, and from certain skills, and can also be fostered and encouraged through parenting and service.

I do what I can to give my kids those experiences. I know that with each challenging experience, each experience that requires them to overcome fears and to adapt to situations, they will become more resilient. Resilience emerges, not just from the experiences themselves, but from their reflections on the accomplishments they can recall later in life. It feeds into their defining themselves, leading to a developed, “coherent” self-concept. As one of my dadding practices, II remind them of the times they have adapted and overcome challenges. Adapting and overcoming may sound familiar because, like many of my contemporaries and like many 21st century educators, I recall many movie quotes and movie scenes and allude to them often as evidence for making decisions or for illustrating important points. From these movies, I have a healthy respect for the effectiveness and resilience of US Marines. I am toying with the idea of adding the Heartbreak Ridge mantra: “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.”

I use scaffolding concepts to build them up as well. I don’t believe in sink or swim mentalities. I believe that greater success is achieved by stepping up challenges. Which is why I disappointed myself two summers ago with my daughter.

This summer (2015), we bought the season pass for the family. We don’t have a pool, and we were pretty sure that the summer was going to be hot. Not only did the water part have thrilling water entertainment, it also had a regular swimming pool and a wave pool.

We were at the wave pool when he said that he wanted to go on the Humunga Half Pipe with me. Thoughts flashed through my mind. One was, “Uh oh.” I was also worried that if I agreed to the adventure, he might chicken out at the top and we would never recover from that moment, making this “backing down” event a defining moment in his life. Another was the flashback of how I failed my daughter when she had needed me.

Failed Dadding

The moment I failed my daughter occurred last summer. We were at Hershey Park. It had a number of thrill rides, “family oriented” rides, and kiddie rides. I had already gone on the Half-Pipe with her two years ago at our local water amusement park, so, when she told me she wanted to go on the looping roller coaster named The SuperDooperLooper, I was proud but also wary.. My daughter was encouraged to be a risk taker, so I agreed, but I was afraid. And I told her so. Which I regretted immediately. After all, these rides are designed and tested. I couldn’t recall one single news report about the ride’s dangers the way I could for Action Park. There were no deaths. So, I decided, yes, we could go. But I was still scared. And the fear infected her. By the time it was our turn to board, she backed down in tears just as the harnesses locked down over us. I signalled the operator, and he let us off.

I felt terrible, and I took full responsibility.

The Half-Pipe experience

I was surprised by my 5-year old son. He wanted to go on the Half-Pipe water slide. This is the scariest ride in our local amusement park. It looks like a saddle, but it’s curved inward, and it drops about 4 storeys. I had only gone on it once before with my daughter. This experience provided one of those minute tests of one’s commitment to dadding that can come and go in an instant, but its consequences may have a lasting effect.

I don’t like scary rides. I don’t like roller coasters or any rides that rely on drops and feelings of freefalling in order to thrill people. I don’t need that kind of excitement in my life. And it’s not just the terror of doubting the track construction, or the security of the seatbelts and shoulder harnesses, the doubts of the latches being properly welded or locked, or the doubts about how the wheels and axles were attached to the car, I also doubted whether the engineers accurately accounted for someone my weight. I’m a husky guy weighing just under 240 lbs.

Don’t get me wrong. I will occasionally take one of these rides. I’ve ridden roller coasters at Great Adventure Six Flags as an adult, and as a kid, I had gone on a class trip to Action Park and rode the Alpine Slide without injury. This is just to say that as fearful as I am, I can overcome my fear, recite the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, but not go gently into my “good night.”

I studied his face for a moment. Then I asked him if he was sure. And I told him I didn’t want to go all the way up the stairs only to turn around. And added that if he wanted to turn around, it would be okay. But he was adamant. So, I told my wife we were going up (because we are men), and I walked with him. I hoisted the bright green tw0-person tube, and we made our way up the stairs.

Did I mention that I am terrified of heights?

Fear of Falling

I’m terrified of heights. It’s not that I don’t like heights. It’s a bona fide fear. I can feal the fear in my legs as well as in my stomach. As we climb higher, I feel the pull of gravity working sideways, working to pull me over the banister only to drag me downward to my doom. I know gravity doesn’t work that way. Once or twice I told myself that “Fear is the mindkiller and I will face my fear and let it pass through me.” (Like I said, I don’t know it word for word.) I also reminded myself that the ride is safe. I’ve seen hundreds of people walk up and take the ride. I’ve gong on the ride myself.

But my fear has a primary and a secondary level. The primary level is the fear of falling to my death. The secondary fear is the fear of remembering the dropping feeling. This dropping feeling might return to me in my nightmares but would feel more vivid, more real, because I was providing the sensory detail from a more recent experience. Freddy from the Elm Street movies had it right. Dreams can be more frightening than any other experience because anything can happen in dreams. And you can’t easily escape dreams.

I was resolved though. I would not punk out like I had with my daughter. She still occasionally asks me, “Daddy, remember when you scared me from taking that roller coaster?”

Luckily, the line was not long. We reached the platform pretty quickly. However, at this point, we could see the drop off as riders settled into the inner tubes. We saw them drop away…and heard them scream. Now, I had a new anxiety. I was afraid that this would break me or break him.

It was our turn. I didn’t look at him. I carried the tube to the watery edge of the slide, put it down. We are going to DO this! My son said he wanted to go first. He wanted to have his back to the slide, but the ride operator said I had to take that spot, because I am the heavier one. I didn’t hesitate. I took my position, and my son took his position without hesitation. I jammed down the impulse to abort the mission. I wondered how the hell I got to this place, terrified but determined. My back to the 4 storey drop, asserting again — “I will not die” — even as I remember another website article on Action Park’s disastrous safety record and incidents. I attempted to recite the Litany, but, to be honest, I can’t completely recall it from memory. I just know the gist of it. I know to face my fear and to let it pass through me.

Then the operator gave us a push, and we were dropping. I refused to close my eyes. I looked into my son’s face to see if he had closed his eyes. He had not. His eyes were wide open. The look of fear and exhilaration and the determination–we are going to DO this!– on his face was exquisite and indelibly burned into my memory. It was like nothing I had ever seen in his face.

(I wished I had my smartphone–waterproofed and attached somehow to my head.)

We passed through the parabola’s vertex 6 times, but only the first two really counted. These were the passes that felt like falling, but only the first pass felt as though there was a danger we would slip up and off the slide itself.

Bonding

There is something about dadding that people mention in passing, but don’t focus on enough. It’s the living because of your children. While dadding, a dad learns so many things he wouldn’t have learned in simple reflection on his own childhood. It’s the learning through doing and serving. Understandings about my own dad are suddenly more available, more accessible. Understandings about my own growth and my own development manifest. After all, I had overcome my own fear.

I swaggered with my son as we walked away from the ride. We recounted what it was like, telling each other about the feeling of falling, about the feeling in our bellies. “You are very brave,” I told him.

He said, “No, I wasn’t brave. I was very scared.”

So, I told him, “Bravery is the ability to do something even though you are afraid. You had courage. You went on the ride even though you were scared.” I told him again, “Courage is the ability to beat your fear.” I said it with intention. I wanted him to remember this moment. We had done it together. We told even more to his sister and mother.

My daughter wanted to go with me next, but I had had enough for one day. Besides, we had ridden together two years ago.  I guess this was another failure, but my nerves were worn out.

I had changed somehow. It was no longer the drop of the ride itself. I still don’t like it, but I knew I could take the ride again. Somehow, my fear of the ride was gone. No, my problem was climbing the stairs and waiting on the stairs between each procession towards the top. Especially the waiting on the top platform.

My fear of heights remained.

Don’t wake your kids to eat breakfast.

To Talk Like This and Act Like That

See on Scoop.it – School Leadership Tools and Resources, Advice and humor

Last month, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association published the most comprehensive review to date of why kids and teenagers should eat breakfast. The article surveyed the results of 47 research papers published since 1970 and reported triumphantly that breakfast-eating seems to “improve cognitive function related to memory, test…

Sharrock‘s insight:

from the article: “The case for circadian rhythms and sleep as key to performance has strong scientific grounding. Sleep researchers have shown that peoples’ preferences for morning or evening activity—for being an early bird or a night owl—are partly genetic and can be apparent even early in life. The body’s 24-hour cycles are mediated by a brain area called thesuprachiasmatic nucleus, located in the hypothalamus. Small substitutions, or polymorphisms, in several circadian clock genes seem to cause variations within the SCN that may contribute to distinct sleep…

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Big 21st Century Daddy Moment

by Duane Sharrock

 

Being a dad gets harder as the kids age, especially as I age. The kids get smarter and put ideas together. They have questions and make mistakes. It gets hard to like my answers and the ways I respond to those mistakes, bad choices, challenges to my authority. It’s harder to be sure I am right to be firm and stand my ground, to raise my voice, to threaten timeout, to give spankings, so certainty of proud moments gets more difficult to remember. There are so few moments I am proud of.

I have one though.

My proudest moment was when my daughter was just turned two years old. She needed a “procedure”, surgery. Her tonsils were swollen to a point that she had trouble breathing when she slept and eating foods were difficult as well. She needed them out.

I wasn’t worried about the operation itself. I knew she would be okay. Instead, I worried about side effects. What would anesthesia do to her developing brain? Also, I dreaded the duration of her recovery and healing. It would take days for her to heal. Her throat would be raw. I knew that even with the pain-relief medicines, she would hurt. It would not be easy.

She was never easy.

She had been born 10 weeks early. She spent days in the NICU, being fed her mother’s milk through a syringe. We had been so scared to handle her; she was so small. A premie. She weighed less than 3 pounds, and the doctors would not release her until she gained more weight.

I cringed the first time I saw them handle her. I thought she was a little twig doll that would snap in two. The nurses bathed her, changed her, burped her with an ease that didn’t seem right for this delicate little thing. We both doubted we would ever be able to handle her carefully enough.

However, we had no time to doubt ourselves for very long. The nurses taught us how to feed her, to change her, bathe her. They told us about the kangaroo technique where she would be held skin against skin. It was supposed to be therapeutic. There is power in touch. I had read that, but it helped to hear it. A fleeting thought flashed through my mind, wondering about the mechanisms that clearly communicated skin was touching skin. All of those little nerve endings, sweat glands, body hairs, oils, air. How? I hoped it would work, even if it did seem magical and undefined.

There were so many developmental milestones she needed to pass like tests and challenges. Medicine had come so far, but I work in special education. I knew there were so many things that could go wrong in her development. Most errors and defects would not be seen and barely suspected, until she was three or four. Others could appear much later. There were no guarantees.

But she was alive. She had already beaten the odds. She was our miracle baby.

We sat with the doctor, and he prepared us again for what to expect, but he had more detail. The doctor talked with us about the procedure. Then he said that only one of us could go into the ready room with her. Neither of us could go in with her to the operating room.

She chose me, her daddy.

In the hospital bed, she was laying down, nervous. She asked me what was happening and I told her the doctor was going to fix her. I smiled at her and touched that space inside that generated calm that was empty of fear and anxiety. It was analytical and observant. It was the place I touched when approaching a violent teen in crisis from the days I worked in a non-secure detention. It was the place I drew from when leading mediation between two students who hated each other, but had agreed to mediation by their peers. It’s my superpower.

In a few minutes, she would go in without me. I imagined her going inside, surrounded by strangers with wearing masks. I didn’t want her traumatized and I didn’t even want her to be afraid. How could I keep her happy and calm? What could I do for her if I cna’t be in there with her? I imagined the faces of doctors and nurses around her. Strangers in masks. Then, they would place a plastic mask on her face. I knew the sudden rush of terror as the simulation ran in my mind, and in a flash, I realized what I could do.

I asked the anesthesiologist for the plastic mask. “Just the mask.” I explained.

“Sure,” he said. He looked at me, surprised.  He produced the mask.

I directed my daughter to watch me. She would wear it like this. I demonstrated.  I said she would breathe in this. Remembering my own operations in high school where I was told to breathe deeply and to count backwards, I told her to breathe deeply. “Like this.”  I put it to my own face and breathed in and out, loudly and slowly. Then I put it on her face. She didn’t even think to reject it, but something flashed through her eyes. I put it back on my face then I put it on her face. “See?” I said. “You are going to wear this for a little while. “

And she was calm. She breathed in the mask. She didn’t look worried at all. I could see so much trust in me in her eyes. But of course she trusted me. I had caught her at the bottom of the sliding boards at the parks. I had carried her in the water during swim classes kept her from going too deep when she blew bubbles.

It was such a simple procedure to desensitize her to the clear plastic mask. After the nurses carted her into the operating room, the doctor said that it was a great idea. I imagined, judging from that fleeting moment of surprise, that the anesthesiologist had never done this before, had never thought of it. I imagined the anesthesiologist would suggest this activity to parents he would meet in the future.

Which makes me Superdad!

This was my proudest moment.

Connecting to “The Power of Leisure: How to Wisely Spend Your Free Time”

 

 

Like any literacy-minded family, we have oodles of picture books. A few of these books are “interactive,” in that you can press illustrated tiles to hear brief audio clips—animal sounds, children’s songs, sound effects, even belches and sneezes. One of the books, which my son has asked for often, lets you hear sound clips from the movie “The Cat in the Hat” starring Michael Myers as The Cat.

One audio clip asks, “What do you want to do for fun?”  I think back to that clip, as well as certain PG-13 scenes from the movie itself, but I also recall the animated television short which follows the original Dr. Seuss book much more closely (i.e., Rated-G). 
The Cat in the Hat book and movies deal with the same topic though, and that topic is:

Kids get bored.

As a kid, I learned not to say that I was bored…ever! Whenever I did say “I’m bored,” my mother would say, “I have a lot of things for you to do if you’re so bored!” She then offered a laundry list of suggestions: I could do my laundry, I could help clean the house; I could vacuum the floor; I could wash the dishes; I could clean my room; I could clean the windows, I could dust the furniture, etc. Rarely, after hearing the list could I escape from being forced to complete at least one of her suggestions. It took a few times, but she effectively conditioned the saying-I’m-bored impulse right out of me. I also learned to keep a low profile and to keep my big fat mouth shut!

That’s a lesson I’m itching to teach my own kids, but I have never followed through on this parenting responsibility, basically because I’m still much more enlightened than my parents, so I suffer for it (my kids are also picky eaters and refuse to eat their vegetables!). As a result of this enlightenment, my kids occasionally complain that there’s nothing to do, and usually, this happens when I am at my computer, composing my thoughts and typing.

Some readers, my age or younger, might suggest that this is a cry for help, and that this complaining indicates a need for parental interaction which would make my kids feel loved and appreciated and supported, and that serving this need for interaction builds relationships and social skills besides. But I am trained as an educator in the USA (in New York State), so I also know that kids need to learn how to play on their own.  So, despite the urge— as a “Cats In The Cradle” singing, guilt-ridden, hard-working dad— to play with my kids or to engage them with some kind of impromptu arts and craft-y diy project, I suggest to them to go play, find something to do, and to leave me alone. I bark, therapeutically, “You need to play on your own!”

This enlightened response is supported by research, of course, in The Power of Leisure: How to Wisely Spend Your Free Time.

But I knew this stuff already. After all, as I might have mentioned earlier, I am a trained educator. I should also add that I am an experienced and reflective educator.

In today’s world of public education, especially in the world of special education, the pursuit of appropriate recreation during “unstructured time” has often come up when discussing students with disabilities, but have also come up in discussion about (and sometimes, with) at-risk students. In various settings and placements, we educators have discussed goals for students on the spectrum to socialize or for students with intellectual challenges to become (more) independent. There are places in individual education plan documents for describing the student’s hobbies, skills, or interests.

Although it is rewarding to find that there are researchers in the social sciences exploring leisure/recreation/unstructured time again, it is inspiring that researchers have developed a taxonomy for leisure activities and experiences. Such taxonomies aid educators in discussing their student needs but these taxonomies also help to analyze and address our own needs and wants. Recreation is what we need to fight burnout and helps us to persist in our various roles, jobs, and careers, but recreation also facilitates mental health and hygiene.

Recreation is a factor (or facet) of resilience. Recognizing these factors of recreation helps us understand that the ability to re-create, or to re-energize, is made up of experiences and skills. Breaking down the 5 factors can help you discern what you should do in order to achieve your recreation goals.

Practicing a musical instrument towards accomplishment and mastery.

The 5 factors of recreation  via The Power of Leisure: How to Wisely Spend Your Free Time are:

Detachment-Recovery where “Leisure can provide a way to relax and recover after working”;

Autonomy;

Mastery where “Leisure can provide a sense of accomplishment”;

Meaning where “Leisure can provide a sense of meaning and purpose”;

and Affiliation.

The big takeaway from the article (and the study it is based on) is that there are choices that must be made and reflective self-assessments that you should do (informally). We have different needs at different times. We need to be more self-aware and more conscious of our recreational choices. It adds new meaning to the suggestion: “Have fun responsibly.”

 

 

“Leisure and Subjective Well-Being: A Model of Psychological Mechanisms as Mediating Factors” http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.org/article/10.1007/s10902-013-9435-x