Movement

My daughter and I share many similarities. We are both the oldest children in our families; we both love adventure; we're both extroverts who thrive off of human connections; we both love morning and autumn and the hopeful anticipation of a letter in the mailbox.

We also both have an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for learning. And along with that desire for new discourse and information comes a penchant for learning something and immediately applying it to our lives. Like, right-at-that-very-second that our synapses fire like pistons and the cerebral cortex starts to chuff up the great mountain of fascination and opportunity, we are ready to teach our new insight to anyone within earshot.

We were born for soapboxes, yes, and I know it can cause some nightmarish tremors with the introverts in our family that feel like some sort of dystopian, endlessly-energized TED talk; yet this gift (or curse) also means that we don't have to plan as much as other people. We can improvise and wing it without a detailed course laid out before us.

Oh, and my daughter is five.*

In any case, I had one of these lightning quick learning experiences last week when I read skimmed something that caught my attention.

The excerpt that caught my interest was by Dr. Larry Crabb, and my understanding of it went like this:

Any interaction you have of more than a few seconds either moves you in a direction that is toward GOODNESS, or away from it.

Now, most certainly, in the 21st Century any notion of goodness as defined by a universal morality has become shockingly ambiguous. One need not look any further than one of America's recent presidential debates to understand that we are dwelling in a world of opaque subjectivity on the matter.

Still, this notion of movement caused me to think deeply about the words our Head of Upper School posed to our community at the beginning of the school year. He encouraged us to ask ourselves, 

"What would my best self do?"

Well, we all have varied views of each other's best selves, but it's likely, at our core, that we know ourselves. We know what it feels like to wake up each morning and simply FEEL GOOD about ourselves.

This morning, in fact, my daughter--that one who loves teaching stuff immediately after learning it--dragged me from bed and into the kitchen: "Dad, look the sun isn't even up yet, but the sky is getting pink...this is the perfect time of day to do the cumbia."

"The what?" I ask, half asleep and putting on a pot of coffee?

"This dance I learned in music class! It is from Latin America. Here, let me show you!"

And there was my daughter in all her glory, teaching me something. Her brain was awake, her heart was awake, and...most importantly, she felt so good about herself.

And this is the heart of it. Our best selves know what it feels like to be humming on all cylinders. We know when we're making good decisions, feeling proud, feeling connected; we know when we're being challenged and being brave, taking risks and surpassing new milestones.

Our brains all wake up in different ways, but having a grasp on ourselves and what wakes us up is important. I loved starting my day with my daughter, being guided toward a deepened understanding of her, and of myself. Her love of dancing in the predawn light of our kitchen was contagious, and in that interaction--one that lasted no more than two minutes--she moved me in the direction of real, tangible goodness.

I know because it made my heart glad. Glad to know her. Glad to be alive. Glad to have today with the movement of the cumbia in my every step and action, and the movement of GOOD in the rhythm of my heart.

*In her words, last week she tipped the scales from being "five and three-quarters" to being "basically six."