Back To School Balance
“How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives.”
It’s that time of year again. We’re all getting back into the swing of things, creating schedules and committing to after school activities and tutoring sessions and sports and hobbies and plans for academic excellence and being Better-Than-We’ve-Ever-Been-Before.
It’s an aspirational season! And yet, it’s also a season when we can become Human Doings instead of Human Beings. For me, the month of September is simultaneously one of the most exciting and most upsetting months of the year to be mentoring our students. I can see the interesting people they’ve become in the three months of summer, having been left to their instincts and their excitement. I can see who they are determined to be in the school year ahead. But I can also see the flurry of activity that threatens to undermine the personal growth and the self-discovery of the unbridled summer.
How do we keep that spirit alive, knowing full well that our child’s unique contribution to the world at large will not be her stellar SAT scores, or her flawless GPA, but rather, her essential self… hopefully reinforced with resiliency and integrity and the core values to contribute meaningfully and intelligently to the world? It’s important to consider how every activity, every programmed hour, impacts childhood development. Will our child benefit more from that extra hour of tutoring every week? Or from taking a walk by the river to observe the world and gain some perspective?
Perhaps more importantly, I believe we have a burden of responsibility to model the balance that we hope for our kids. As we step into this busy season, which seems only to escalate in pace and obligation through to the winter holidays, it’s a fruitful moment to step back and examine the messaging we are sending to our kids. How are we spending our days? What message are we sending about how to spend our lives?
Perhaps we postpone a work dinner and take our kids out for a night of ambling round the Met with no particular agenda, simply seeking objects of beauty. Perhaps we keep a weekend morning clear in the schedule for all members of the family to eat pancakes and play Scrabble together (there’s vocab to be mastered there!). How can we carve out a message to our kids that who they are when they’re just being matters just as much as what they do. How can we model for the children in our lives the balance we hope for them?
Here’s to an autumn of equilibrium for us all.