Month: May 2021

The way she learns

Watching kids learn is so insightful. My four-year-old has picked up a longboard (my longboard, or something formerly known as mine). The way she tries to ride is so interesting. There is absolutely no stress about mastering the skill. She looks at what I do, she listens to my advice — sometimes she follows it, sometimes she doesn’t.

There’s absolutely no pressure. She holds my hand — one foot on the board, the other one pushing. She then steps with the second foot, and waits for the board to stop. She tries to do the same by herself a few times, succeeds. Then goes back to holding my hand. Then, after a bit, she sits on the board and pushes with both feet. Or she runs around, carrying the board, “looking for a place to start”. Then she tries again.

My instructions are often redundant, because what I have in mind is very different from what she’s doing. While I’m thinking in terms of “how do I learn this”, along with “how do I get past the embarrassment of not being able to do this well”, she is playing. She is not concerned with the looks, or with the mastery. She is simply having fun.

And I bet, with an approach like that, kids learn better than adults.

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Monday quote: Haruki Murakami

I used to have a habit of copying down all quotes from books that i read into a notebook. That habit is long gone, but I like going back to the quotes of something that I once read.

Today is Monday — start of the week for those who don’t consider the weeks to be starting on Sunday. I can add the first thing I read on a Monday here, and maybe in a year, it’d be interesting to go back and revisit what I was reading. It’s not a quote, as something that I found particularly interesting, or true, or could relate to. It is the first thing that I had in my reading day.

Last night, I started reading a new collection of stories by Haruki Murakami, titled “First Person Singular: Stories.” I read just one story before bed, and today, I started with the second story, “On A Stone Pillow.” Here’s the quote, beginning of the story.

I’d like to tell a story about a woman. The thing is, I know next to nothing about her. I can’t even remember her name, or her face. And I’m willing to bet she doesn’t remember me, either. When I met her, I was a sophomore in college, and I’m guessing she was in her mid-twenties. We both had part-time jobs at the same place, at the same time. It was totally unplanned, but we ended up spending a night together. And never saw each other again.

Haruki Murakami “On A Stone Pillow”

Tomorrow, Daniel Kahneman’s new book is released, “Noise. A Flaw in Human Judgement”, let’s see what I’m reading next Monday.

By the way, one story from Murakami reads like part of Salinger’s “Nine Stories,” juxtaposed over Japan a few decades later. It’s “With The Beatles.”

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Got anything?

Every day I pick her up from daycare, she asks, “Have you got anything for me?” and often, “What is it? What do you have for me?”

I’m her drug dealer.

(Of course I’m her drug dealer, I give her chocolates in doses that are far from homeopathic. Highly addictive at the age of four.)

Posted on by T