***never ever***When people think "always" and "never", they get stuck in "always" and "never", and can't see the in-between where, most often, the details and valuable bits of wisdom are.I've found that a lot of new unschoolers seem to get stuck in extreme thinking--the always and never lands. 😉 I probably did too. Maybe it's part of adjusting to a new paradigm of thinking.
It kind of reminds me of when we manually adjust the focus on a camera. (I'm talking about before auto-focus.) We adjust the lens back and forth to first find the extreme edges of clarity. When we know where those slightly blurry edges are, we can then move closer to where the true, crisp capture of whatever it is we hope to see lies.
The thing is, if we don't move away from the extremes--those slightly blurry edges--we won't get to appreciate the crisp details of whatever it is we do hope to see and understand better.
That's true for most things, I believe.
Learn to recognize your own extreme thinking. See the nevers and the alwayses. 😊 Then, move around a bit, in search of greater clarity. That shift in thinking will help most relationships, I'm confident.
Joyce Fetteroll wrote something wonderful on balance:
"Unschooling is the opposite of both authoritarian and hands off parenting. It's neither about creating rules to remote parent nor about letting kids jump off cliffs. It's about being more involved in kids lives. It's about accompanying them as they explore, helping them find safe, respectful and empowering ways to tackle what intrigues them." (on Family RUNning, March 5, 2009) |
