This morning my daughter crayoned a quick picture for me, an abstraction of a rainbow that looks like a staircase, and then she wrote her name on it. Beneath the rainbow were the letters
SIE
and on the back of the sheet,
NA.
Later, I’m going to have to explain this to my wife, to her mom. See, I’ll say, she wrote her name, which starts here … and ends here. And if they’re anything like me, they’ll necessarily pause for a moment, needing a second or two to process this idea alighting upon the a-hah of understanding. It’s true; when you read the big letters above, didn’t you briefly pause to put the ideas together? Front-and-back integration is actually hard for us. What doesn’t even register on the brain of a four-year-old requires a focused effort from her parents.
Professionally, I want to be more like Siena. Working with words and web pages, I am always shoehorning my ideas into a hierarchical structure, the columnar layout of HTML pages, the little rectangles of a PowerPoint slide. I like being a stay-at-home dad, juxtaposing parenting with professionalism, because this breaks the mold. I learn from both, and then apply to both. Exceptions are cracks in the mold. The reason it takes time to process these exceptions is because we’re re-learning, growing, becoming smarter, finding wisdom. There’s insight aplenty jammed into those cracks.
Handwriting analysis experts will explain how the edges of our penmanship matter a great deal when interpreting personality. Writing up to the very edge of the physical page implies desperation and compensation (you just can’t afford the delay of starting a new line), whereas leaving lots of extra whitespace implies carelessness and distraction (you just can’t wait to start a new line). And if you get to the bottom of a page or card and start bending the text and writing upwards along the margin, you probably don’t know to relax and let go. But Siena and other kids her age don’t even see the edges; they don’t think twice about turning it over and using the backside. And Oren, who draws on toys, tables, and every exposed part of his body (especially the fascinating bottoms of his bare feet), doesn’t acknowledge the specialness of the paper itself. In adults, these behaviors tend toward mental instability.
The box is how we function. Ignore it, and excel.