The joy of little tikes

Yesterday my neighbor asked me to take her daughter to preschool, as she had a doctor's appointment. No problem. I love this kid. In fact, I love little kids a lot. I confess they love me back. We understand each other.

This one, mature before her time, admonished me at the door: "You're real late!" she says with a smile, while her housekeeper zips her parka so close to her neck i think she'll choke. Yup, she's right. It's 8:48, and i was due at 8:45.

Sasha, my little friend, is strawberry blonde, her parents English, all fair and creamy, and she's decked head to toe in purple. She looks like a berry with fuzz on top. "Do you have airbags?" she asks. I stare at her.

"Uh, yes, i think i do, honey. Why do you ask?"

"My mom won't let me ride with anyone who doesn't have airbags. But also, I can't ride in the front if you have airbags up there."

I'm about to tell her that they are side ones, and then i think wait a cotton-pickin' minute: she's three.

The clash of adulthood and youth one encounters in the preschool world is grist for whole novels. Anyway, my point is that i was so excited just to have this one little call of routine, so primordial - launching kids as the starting shot of the daily race - that i organized myself into a pretty fabulous state before 8:30. A little kid can do that to you.

And then at the entry hall of the preschool, i encountered the Other side. In the entry, i meet one of those moms who, having completely merged with the Motherhood persona, only speaks in 1st person plural now; and in a voice that must be hers, but sounds like Elmo: "How are we all today? Isn't this the sun-shiniest morning for all the wee ones? Aren't we feeling chirpy about this special day, most special in all the world?"

She's looking at me. I've never met her, but now we're a "we." I want to give her a jar of Gerbers and ask her who eats it in the morning. I wonder what her husband thinks.

Ah, Preschool. The wonder of it all.

Feelings - the final frontier

In the 90s, we had the decade of the brain. The brain, it seemed, held all the answers to our concerns about intelligence, or the lack thereof. Then came Daniel Goleman, with his landmark book, "Emotional Intelligence," which at least began to shift the meter in the right direction.
We have forgotten the real value of feelings. Emotional expression in the workplace is considered childish. In fact, any emotional display by a person over 21 - other than weddings and funerals - is considered, well, a sign of weakness. Emotional people are considered a bit inferior to intellectual people. You can't get a Ph.D. in emotional mastery. Artists, whose careers are based in the felt relationship with the sea of possibilities, are somehow not as "legitimate" as the smarty pants running the show in our governments and our companies.
Interestingly, this one feature of human experience - feeling - holds the key to a lot of our problems. We tend to think of emotions as some disturbance to the order of life. In actual fact, it's just the opposite: emotions help us navigate. Whenever i work with clients, i know i've gotten to the heart of the matter when there are tears. Tears are the clue to what touches people at their core. I noodle around with them, not seeking catharsis, but movement. I want to know what moves people.
Think of it this way: e-motion. Feelings are all about motion. Feelings tell us what we want more of and what we want less of, period. Aversive feelings, like fear and anger, send us seeking more distance from a person or situation. Pleasant feelings like joy or wonder, cause us to move toward a person or situation. We are not meant to be slaves to every impulse; but the information is valuable. Often, in maturity, adults grow so accustomed to suppressing their feelings in order to manage their professiona lives or other responsibilities, that they can't remember, anymore, what feeds them. Then they don't know how to move.
But emotion is just one aspect of the feeling frontier. Feelings also show us how we relate to beauty. When we can feel, we can be uplifted by beauty. Sensitivity - the capacity to respond to subtle cues - is automatically linked to beauty. It is linked to sensuality, too. The capacity to experience pleasure is literally located, anatomically, on the same neurons that mediate the experience pain. If you feel, you have to accept both ends of the spectrum. We are meant to experience joy and fulfillment in our lives, not just the knee-jerk repetition of old scripts. In order to move toward more joy, when we are stuck in a place of staleness and suppression, we must feel our way. Those first few steps can be pretty interesting.