Skinned Knees (or Noses)
Avoiding Avoidance
My grandson recently fell and skinned his...nose.
It got me thinking — why do we react, or not react, the way we do...to events like skinned knees (or noses)?
And, I've concluded maybe we all should keep skinning our knees....
When a kid falls down and scratches his or her knee, we seem pretty much OK about it (a little more concerned when it's their face). But, the basics are there — we kind of know a few things about this situation and don’t really worry about it too much.
The reality is that skinning your knee (at any age), even it it feels uncomfortable or painful, is not too “serious". Somehow the bumps, bruises and scrapes of children on things like sidewalks are just part of what it takes for them to understand where and how to be careful — to learn what to watch out for, when to be cautious, etc. We empathize and hold them for a few minutes, but we don’t go overboard and we don’t take them to the hospital. We kind of know that, in some way, it’s a necessary part of their process of discovery in navigating a world where such things are learned about how to avoid some of the problems or things that can be painful in life.
But, here's another observation. It would appear that we have a decreasing capacity to handle much pain individually or as a society. Sometimes it feels like nearly any contrivance is an offense of epic proportions, and one hast to wonder what our kids are learning as a result of that kind of collective disposition to life. It’s almost as if we now have no tolerance for pain, dealing with it primarily by to trying to extinguish it all together with a rather wide variety of tactics.
Perhaps, like many things in our society, a lot of the remedies that we have are no longer viewed simply as situational enhancements. They have become the only means with which we know how to experience something. Take pain medication, for example, if we can't get it, then it appears at times that we think we will die. We know that’s not literally true, but psychologically it sometimes appears as if we believe it is.
Either way, the question might start to become, do we get too good at avoiding our skinned knees situations? Do we get too good at navigating and avoiding; anticipating everything that could result in the scrapes and bruises of life? I’m afraid, sometimes we do; at least, those of us who are privileged to have the option of making those kinds of choices. But, it’s also a little conspicuous that the flip-side of avoiding anything that would be a bump or bruise in life can end up keeping us from doing or trying anything.
The beauty of children and an unanticipated crack in the sidewalk is that they often are just trotting along, looking at something, noticing something, feeling something, experiencing something. They run toward things without how much self-consciousness about the potential perils of doing so. And, sometimes, they trip and fall. But, they are growing and learning about a lot of stuff, even what is actually substantial and what isn’t, about the things that happen in the process of doing so.
Becoming so astute as adults at avoiding potential pitfalls, can lead us towards no longer discovering much of anything about the realities of life. In fact, we may even become disinterested in trying anything new and perhaps not just in physical ways, but in any other kind of way as well. We don’t run down the sidewalks of our lives any more, because of the possibilities of what we might bump into, or the minor injuries that could occur along the way.
Further, the inability to effectively deal with pain in our own lives seems to affect our capacity to relate to pain in other peoples lives. If we are completely unable to engage with pain, including the pain that other people experience, perhaps it’s because we have developed no musculature, physically, emotionally, or psychologically within ourselves. So, something is simple as a skin knee can actually be a part of a broader spectrum of equipping kids with how to deal with the pain of life, whatever format it tends to come in. By choosing the route of avoidance, we actually may be forfeiting a lot more than we realize.
I should acknowledge that the scraped knee experiences of our lives are not the same thing as real trauma. We should not take the logic of the point of this piece and extend into some of the terribleness of life, that we or others have or are going through.
What I'm talking about is more that we feel (or should feel) a little conflicted about trying to protect children from everything, as we should for ourselves. Should we prevent those kinds of things in our lives, as well, or at the very least become as sophisticated at doing so that we may not even recognize it when we are?
When this happens to a kid, we can put a Band-Aid on it and say that a kid will 'get over it'. They move on and for some reason don’t seen to fall down and scratch and scrape themselves every time they go outside. This may be true about us, too. There’s things that, for whatever reason we’ve estimated to be somewhere between serious and lethal turn out, more often than not, not to be. The process of even injuring ourselves a little bit here and there, as we have real encounters with things that we thought were true or that we discovered, actually teach us a bit more deeply about what it means to live a full life.
Besides, aren’t the best stories, both the ones we love to hear and the ones we love to tell, about the variety of aches and pains, and bumps and bruises and things that we’ve run into in our lives? Aren't many of these, in effect, signals that life can have it hurts and pains, and that most of it is not as bad as we might otherwise tend to believe? And, that our categories of such things, especially when they are the ones that we learned as children, when remaining imposed on us as adults really do inhibit our capacity to participate and grow in what we call life?
It’s not like we need to be hell-bent on everything extreme or completely beholden to the mantra 'no fear'. There are good reasons to be afraid of things; certain things, especially. But, when we organize our whole lives around avoidance, often due simply to the possibility of pain, we become something less than we truly are (as opposed to discovering more of what we truly are…like a child).