Common Sense
“Common
sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different
speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
Clive
Jones
Good, old-fashioned
common sense seems in short supply these days. I've tried to analyze
this phenomenon as to cause and origination, and always come up at a
loss. But here's my working hypothesis, one which I've now heard from
a number of researchers who know far more than I do about just about
everything. Common sense is acquired by doing common things, failing
at some, succeeding at some, and learning from both failure and
success.
Here's a case in point: When I was sixteen and had a brand
new drivers license, my daddy owned an big, new Pontiac Bonneville—if
you were of age in 1962, you know that means a land yacht of epic
proportions. My cousin, Sandy, and I drove it uptown (all of 3 blocks
from my home and easily walked) and I endeavored to park it in a
public parking lot. Now, common sense would dictate that a car of
that size would be difficult to park in a crowded parking lot,
especially one that had straight-line parking spaces, but at 16, I
had zero common sense, so I tried. I began by hitting the door of the
car on my left side, then tried to back out and caught the bumper of
the car on my right side, panicked and gunned the engine, hitting a
car in the row behind me—now four cars, including my dad's, were
trashed. My response to this calamity was to leap from the car, now
diagonally blocking the traffic lane so that no one could pass, and
run to the police station several blocks away. I entered, bawling like
someone had just shot a baby, and screaming, “I just wrecked four
cars in a parking lot! Help me, please!” After the shocked
policemen stopped laughing, two of them very civilly walked back to
the parking lot with me, extricated my car from the snarl of metal
and rubber, and called my dad to come get it. It was a spectacular
display of moronic misjudgment—from which I learned a great lesson.
Ever since, the cars that I own are compact.
I wonder how often these
days we allow children to learn things the hard way. There is now a
good bit of research about the effects of over-protecting children,
and taking care of their mistakes for them. We want to be good
parents; I get that, but what happens as a result is that our children grow up to be incompetent adults. One of my sons worked for a couple of years in a
recovery center. He spoke often about having to teach young men how
to operate a washing machine, use a can opener; how to make a bed, and
other simple household chores. Our children learn how to do things by
trial and error, by trying and failing, and if we never allow them
the dignity of that opportunity, they may earn multiple graduate degrees, but simply not have the
walking-around sense to take care of themselves as adults. Common
sense dictates, and research supports, that when we do something for a child that they can do
for themselves, we undermine their confidence in their own abilities.
That is not good parenting.
Everybody should be
allowed to make stupid mistakes when they're young—how else will
they learn? Learning such things as how to ask for help when they
need it, where to go to get that help, and that they don't have to
take themselves so darn seriously are life-long, and life-sustaining
lessons. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say about it: “Common
sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.” We
need more of that.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment