{10} Giving up should for want
What is the difference between “boredom” and “lack of commitment”? This is the question a friend and I were pondering in reaction to my post where I discussed being unschooled as a child. She’s homeschooling her own son, and asked me if, as an adult now, I regret not having more structure in my life as a kid.
The answer, for the record, is a resounding “NOPE.”
Pressuring kids to perform is the basic premise of what we call a modern education, though. And I say this as neither a parent nor a professional educator: kids do need some pressure, because otherwise they would never brush their teeth or help with chores around the house or, sometimes, be nice to other kids. They need a bit of herding, someone to point the way to go. They are children, after all.
But consider this: I am here now, typing this out, using the “touch typing” technique on my QWERTY keyboard. On a good day I can still hit 70 words per minute. I learned how to do this around the age of 7 or 8, at the latest.
Mother had a nice electronic typewriter and she bought me one of those stand-up touch typing course books (this was the 1970s, okay?). And that was it, that was all she did. No daily practice times, no goals, no tests. At this point I don’t remember how long it took me to become minimally proficient, and I use that word loosely because I was around 8 years old and could not spell for crap, but I remember being excited to sit down at that typewriter every day and bang out those exercises in that book. I wanted to be able to type fast in order to write stories, and so through the drudgery of “vmv vvm mmv mvm kmvm mvm vmv” I practiced and typed and suffered mistakes (because typewriters? those unholy beasts do not allow for deleting the ink you’ve smacked onto the page) until I could reasonably touch type.
Did I get bored? Did Mother sometimes remind me that I needed to practice? Sure. That was all secondary to learning the thing. I was committed. There was no “should” in my vocabulary (aside from the fact it was hard to spell), there was only “want.” I had a goal for myself and I did the eight year old version of busting ass to do reach it.
People always say that being bored at school is just the price of learning, but I don’t think that is true. I think kids naturally and instinctively want to learn how to do things, and will go to great lengths to do that if we help them.* The problem isn’t boredom, it’s lack of interest, the fact they have zero commitment to the cause. We tell them what they should do, and ignore what they want to do.
We’re fully prepared to be bored by something if we are committed to the outcome — for me, learning to type was worth the agony of repeating numbing exercises endlessly, because I wanted to type out the stories I dreamed up. Everyone, I’m sure, can give a similar example of this kind of dedication to something in their life.
But if we are not committed to the purpose, nothing short of threats against our person is going to make us do the thing. You don’t want to fail? Then study math. You don’t want to get kicked out of school? Then don’t fail your classes. You don’t want to be homeless? Then show up for that job you hate because you need the paycheck. Ad nauseam.
To wit: the difference between “lack of commitment” and “boredom” is the inverse of the difference between “should” and “want.”
This has become a personal issue of late, as I focus on the emotional/psychological sources of my inherent reticence and self-hate. A lot of my mental energy is taken up with “should” — get up at the “right” time, go to bed at the “right” time, get the “right” amount of sleep, eat the “right” foods, do things (everything) the “right” way. Do all the things the way they should be done!
Some of it stems from my OCD inclinations, which are mostly subdued but still appear whenever I get stressed out (at one awful job, my coworkers started calling me “Monk” after the television show character because I was…let’s just use the term fastidious and leave it at that, shall we?).
But the rest of it is, I think, my attempt to fit my very abnormally shaped self into the square peg of “normal.” And it just…it just makes me miserable, okay? MISERABLE.
It’s a feedback loop, as all the best ruts are: I hate myself so I decide I need to do things “right” to make myself acceptably human, which of course I fail at because no one is perfect, and then I hate myself more for failing, repeat.
And yet…I became a good touch-typist without any “shoulds”. I’ve done so much that I loved without any “shoulds” attached, actually. I keep stopping myself from doing things I want to do because I “should” do something else, or do it a different way, or do it for different reasons.
At this point, I’m done with “should.”
Even the simple things, like chores laundry and brushing my teeth — I will do these things because I want to have a liveable homestead and be socially presentable and healthy. I want to feel committed to living a good life, not bored by my obligations.
It’s scary, because since I left the protective bubble of being unschooled, I’ve felt the pressure to fit in and do things I “should” do for the “right” reasons. The deaths of my parents and the subsequent collapse of my entire world when I was about 25 only made that all worse for me, and the resultant years of poverty (fueled by crumbling economies) fueled my worst fears.
We are told that adulthood runs on obligations and boredom. Scared and self-loathing and insecure, I doubted what I knew to be true and believed the hype for nearly three decades.
I was a child who was excited to learn new things, write stories, dance, and love with my whole heart. I was sometimes bored but always committed.
It’s time I become the adult that child was always meant to be.
*(And yeah, I’ve heard the stories of the kid who only wants to run around outside with a soccer ball and not read, the kid who wants to read all day and never do math, the kid who hates playing piano, the kid who only wants to play piano…everyone has their joy. But are you sure that kid will do that one thing all day and nothing else? I know you aren’t sure because that’s not how we school kids, we tear them away from what they are doing to make them do something else, over and over and over. If all you want is pizza, and everyone lets you have a bite of pizza then forces you to sit at a salad buffet and “try the kale!!!!” you are going to obsess about the pizza. That’s how we’re wired. Lots of caveats here for for the fact that people have wide ranges of abilities, that I’m not a professional educator, this is all my own opinion, etc.)
