- Details
- Category: Current Issue
One of the biggest advantages to getting older is that you gain knowledge from your experiences that you want to pass along to others. This makes perfect sense because when you do something once, you are (typically) better at it when you do it again and again and again. As humans, we start learning from our experiences as babies and will eventually figure out that holding the bucket upright will keep the water in until we are ready to pour it out. But there are many things in life that we might only learn how to do when someone else shows us, such as riding a bike, driving a car or … flying a kite!
Recently, we visited the North Sea and had the real pleasure, on a pleasantly warm-ish, sunny and breezy day, to sit and sip tea while watching people walk by and families enjoy the beach. This is when we noticed a young couple with their young child (maybe 4 years old) who were trying to fly a kite. The child was bouncy and playful while mom kept an eye on him as dad focused on the kite string. It struck both of us as a bit odd that dad was so focused on the kite string that we, at first, thought he must be getting out a knot or maybe the string broke and he was tying it together? It was only after several long minutes of watching dad that we realized that there was neither a knot nor a broken strand which was consuming his focus, but rather a lack of kite flying knowledge in general. We arrived at this conclusion after witnessing dad fling the kite into the air only to have it immediately fall to the ground. He repeated this procedure 2 or 3 more times until he settled into the original string investigation stance we observed. What was that all about? Did he think the string was faulty? I mean, doesn’t everybody know that to get a kite in the air you either need to run with it and slowly let the wind get hold of it or have another person (a distance away) let it go? After about 10 minutes, mom, growing tired of watching their ‘moving on to other activities’ child, took over the kite flying duties. We both figured that certainly mom would know how to fly a kite. Right? That is until we saw her performance. It was even worse than dad’s as she tried, with all her uncoordinated might, to throw the kite into the air, for more than 15 minutes. It was then that I had to refrain my husband from getting up, going over and showing the family how to actually fly a kite.
I refrained my husband for two reasons: I didn’t want him to diminish the parents’ abilities in front of the child and I was hopeful that the parents would work to solve their problem on their own. It was clear that perhaps no one had ever showed them how to fly a kite, but it was also clear that they both had cell phones and could have simply looked on the internet to see how to do it. In the end, my only hope was that, in the absence of having someone show them how to do it, they would, on another windy day, try again…
Run! Run!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
.