Category Archives: who says moving faster is better?

My friend and colleague Gabrielle Kaplan-Meyer recently started an online magazine called Jewish Disability Inclusion News.  This is a recent blog post that I wrote for her featuring one of my songs, You Have No Idea.

You can subscribe to the newsletter at Substack at this link if you are interested in reading pieces from other people.

And as always, please share this with others that you think would be interested or appreciate these thoughts or songs.

I will be writing additional blogs based on my many songs about inclusion, exclusion, compassion, lack of compassion…the reality of moving through the world while being wired differently. Stay tuned…

https://jewishdisabilityinclusionnews.substack.com/p/you-have-no-idea-a-song-explains?sd=pf

Remember those early days of the Corona shutdowns, back in March?  Now many things are reopening, and it is almost hard to remember what we were experiencing back then.  Many of my friends had written about how the “shelter-in-place” rules had provided a welcome and most unexpected opportunity to have their adult children at home for an extended period of time.  Others bemoaned that their kids specifically chose NOT to come home, trying to be responsible, afraid that as millennials they were potential COVID carriers and might unknowingly affect their parents aged 60 and older.  Each family chose what worked best for them.  Our adult son with autism lives with us anyways, and since his university was closed, he is now living and learning and working all from his room.  Our adult daughter has a theater job where everyone was asked to work from home, so she chose to come home to us and work from here initially.  It has been years since we have all been under one roof for such a long period of time, and never under these conditions of course!

Our daughter is an organizer by nature, and immediately got busy organizing game nights.  No one had anywhere to go, and in those early days all of our work and deadlines were accompanied by huge question marks.  We hadn’t done game nights in years.  In fact, because our son’s learning disabilities make college work incredibly time-consuming, we probably haven’t played a game in at least the 6 years that he’s been in college.  And, because his work is also so all-consuming mentally, he didn’t remember any of the rules of some of the games we used to play.  No worries, now was the time to take a breath and review some of the life skills that he used to know how to do but has forgotten.  Not that playing a card game is a life skill, but it was reflective of the many things that have disappeared from his daily routines that we could now review.

So we retaught him the rules to Spit, also known as Slam, Speed, or Double Solitaire.  Everyone know that one?  You can google it if not, it’s a fun game.  But it totally favors people who think fast and move fast.  In other words, the type A personalities of the modern world.  The go-getters, the self-starters, the movers and the shakers, the leader types.  Our son does not move fast.  The other three of us do.  Seems therefore like a very unfair game.  But something interesting happened.

Each time we played, the three of us raced through the game, slamming cards down in their appropriate places as fast as we were physically able to.  Our son moved slowly, a little bothered by the fact that he couldn’t move as fast as the rest of us, but mostly just focused on his cards and getting his cards into the right piles.  And then, in every game, we reached a point where the three of us fast-movers were stuck.  We couldn’t move anymore cards anywhere, and we had to sit there, waiting for him to get through his cards.  But now he wasn’t racing against us, because we couldn’t do anything, so he could go at the pace that suited him, take his time, think quietly and comfortably about his cards and where to put them.  And the rest of us just sat there.  Four out of five games, he won.  All of our breathless racing was pointless.

I loved it!  What a silly, but significant, reflection of how the “meek” shall inherit the earth, (though my son is anything but meek.) As we sat there playing these silly card games, Corona had brought the world’s economies to a standstill, with all the wealthy powerful (arrogant?) nations in the exact same boat as less prosperous parts of the world.  Running faster wouldn’t make Corona go away, but stopping and staying put, inside one’s houses, might just work.  What a change of pace, literally.

I’m not sure that I will begin to play this card game any differently than I ever have, but those game evenings in the early days of Corona definitely made me question all the running I do in the rest of my life…and shown my son that being that slow and steady tortoise is not something to be ashamed of, despite his family members’ hare-like habits.

There are many different interpretations of the old Aesop’s tale about the race between the tortoise and the hare.  Some recent versions that I have come across in my lifelong love and research of folk tales has the tortoise as a cheater, setting things up like an illusionist, getting all of his relatives to wait at different intervals along the race track, tricking the hare into thinking that the tortoise is always in front of him, when really it is many different tortoises working together as con artists.  In this version, the poor hare is the victim, just running along, following the rules, unwittingly being tricked into thinking that he has lost the race to the cheating tortoise. 

That’s not the interpretation I grew up with, or that I use.  I wonder about this latest interpretation, clearly favoring the hard-running loud, braggart hare.  What does that say about the values of modern society?  About who is worthy of respect and who is not? I have always seen the story as a race between an arrogant, fast talking, fast moving hare, boasting about how great he is, and a slower, but more organized and efficient tortoise, who has lived a long and wise life, who knows that he doesn’t have to be the flashiest or the quickest thing on the block in order to make it across the finish line.  The hare, in his hubris, has no respect for the tortoise.  He is youthfully derisive of the much older tortoise and is so sure that he can win the race without even trying that he doesn’t bother to prepare for it and takes naps all along the race route.  

I loved watching my son win those card games.

No song this time.  I am working on one that starts, “I guess I’m more a tortoise than a hare…”

For anyone not familiar with Jewish Passover Seders (Seder is a Hebrew word that means “the order of things”, and is the name for the traditional ceremony that Jewish people perform every year on the holiday of Passover, which follows a specific order), there is an annual precious part of the Seder where the youngest participant recites what are called the four questions (really one question with four different answers.) The question is “What makes this night different from all other nights?” And the four answers relate to the ways that the holiday rules make the time of Passover unique and different from the rest of the year. It’s always a sweet time because generally the youngest participant has been practicing for the night for a while, and if they don’t collapse in a puddle of stage-fright, they generally get their first standing ovation and are often bitten with the “love of limelight” bug right then and there.

But this year of course, in the spring of Corona, Jewish people all over the world were struck by the obvious answer to that annual question of “What makes this night different from all other nights?” Well, everything really.  For the first time in history, people everywhere are confined to their own homes, (not because of war), and what has always been a large extended family or community celebration, was now regulated to celebrating with whoever was in your immediate home. So in 2020, everything is different…including, thank goodness, long distance communication and the platform Zoom…how we all wish we had purchased shares in Zoom in early February!!  So, many of us resorted to Zoom Seders this year.

What was not different I realized, was my pre-Seder anxiety. I had invited a few friends (who would otherwise have been celebrating alone) to join us on a Zoom Seder, with no intention of trying to do the post meal parts of the Seder (which are always a hotly contested issue anyway: every family seems to have members that feel that the Seder must be completed, even if it lasts until 1 or 2 AM, vs the members who are pragmatic and only interested in doing the symbolic Seder up until the part with dinner.) In the days leading up to the April 8 Seder I thought to myself that this year this would be a breeze, I’m not cooking for a huge mass of people, I don’t have to worry if my house is super clean and organized for an incoming crowd…we’ll just do a little bit of symbolic cooking, set the dining room table nicely, and call everyone on Zoom. What could be anxiety producing?

My son is almost 25. He has autism. That’s not new, so I am not still in the early stages of understanding and figuring out autism. I have had plenty of years to get my head around this, 25 to be exact. And yet, I am still amazed at the number of times that I forget about the profound affect that autism has had on all of our lives.

While I was fitting in preparing the Seder foods for our own family and a friend between my online music teaching, I was of course juggling (as I do every day) my son’s learning needs and confusion, exacerbated of course by now having all of his learning go online. He is a kinesthetic, visual learner who does best when he can see modeled what it is that he is supposed to be working on. All of that is out the window now of course. In the midst of my juggle, he and I started arguing about something inconsequential, which built and built in the way that only inconsequential things do (especially when they are masking something else underneath), until he screamed at me, “You’re always in a bad mood when you are preparing for Passover!” And I thought, though I didn’t actually scream it, “And you’re always in a bad mood ON Passover!”

Ah-hah…light bulb…we were both being triggered. Triggered by all the years of non-Zoom Seders when something out-of-the-ordinary-routine happened and set off a sensory overload meltdown. Unconsciously immersed in fear, both of us, of that impending meltdown. What caused the meltdowns? The list is endless, and anyone reading this who has Sensory Processing Disorder or is a parent of someone with special needs would have their own list, but here is my partial list: just being out of routine, traveling to family somewhere else in the country, sleeping in someone else’s house or a hotel, the big table full of family and people he might not have known, the cacophony of lots of loud cousins in echoey rooms, the rules of when to eat what, (there is of course that truly amusing memory of the year that someone set the bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the table next to where my son was sitting. We only noticed that he had neatly peeled and eaten 13 eggs – white part only, making a creative circle of yolks around his plate, when we got to the part of the Seder where we were all supposed to eat a hard-boiled egg, and of course there were not enough left for everyone), the endless waiting for the food to happen (asking in a loud voice, “Why do we have to sit around the table if we can’t eat?”), husband and I gauging the room…can we let him go and run around or find something else to do, is that going to be considered bad form, is he not going to want to do that because his cousins are all staying, etc etc? In short, trying to make him fit in to socially expected norms is what caused/es the meltdowns.

I have written in a previous blog about my son’s wonderful, admirable, enviable knack of being able to call out the elephant in any room that he enters. I love this ability of his, though of course there have been times that the conformist in me wanted to crawl under a rug when he said something particularly off-color by politically correct standards.

But this Wednesday, I breathed in, breathed out, thanked my son for pointing out my pre-Seder mood to me, and carried on the day with a little more understanding. (I also on the spot renewed my long-discarded practice of going out for a one-mile run, and it was wonderful!)

Evening came, we set the table for Passover, we connected computers and television screens to Zoom, welcomed all of our friends via Zoom, and helped a 90 year old guest figure out how to use Zoom, which was truly momentous (I only pray I have half of her mental capacities when I get to 90.) Instead of charging straight into the Seder, we did a check-in, asking each one to say a word or two about how they were feeling on this night when everything is out of routine and we are asking, “What makes this night different from all other nights?”

We all went around the Zoom room, and everyone was of course dealing with the Corona isolation in different ways, but thankful to be able to be together in this format, different as it was. When we got to our son’s turn, he said, “What makes this night different from all other nights? Everything! We wouldn’t normally have a TV screen on the table, and you would all be here with us. And truthfully, even though it is good to see you, it really feels lonely that you’re not here with us. That’s what I’m feeling. I want to feel thankful, but I just feel lonely that we can’t be with you and you can’t be with us.”

Nailed it. Called out the elephant in the room. Not politically correct. Not socially acceptable. But honest in just the wonderful way that he can be.  In the Western world we are all trained to keep a stiff upper lip, always point out and focus on the positive, maybe just not mention the negative.  As my mother used to say, “What good is it going to do you?”  And there is definitely truth in that, vis a vis is the cup half empty or half full?  But there is also tremendous need to acknowledge what isn’t great. And there is a lot not great about this odd time that we are living in, along with lots of silver linings.

We have long let go of the need to make our son fit in to every social norm that there is.  (He’s also an adult, 25 as I mentioned, so even if I still believed that was important, which I don’t, I couldn’t make him anyway.)

Because my son was feeling lonely and sad that Corona was also impacting this holiday that he has had such mixed feelings about over the years, he decided that he wasn’t in the mood to sit there for the Seder part, and left to work on homework, cycling back in when we got to the hard boiled eggs. Where he proceeded to eat just one. Leaving the yolk on the side. No meltdown this year. What makes this night different from all other nights? Everything, and in some ways, nothing.

I shared this song back when I started this blog in 2016…time for a review! Not about Passover, not about Corona, but about the elephants in the room that neuro-typical people try valiantly to hide while non-neuro-typical people simply reveal. Happy Passover/Easter/Ramadan everyone. I hope everyone is staying safe.

I have often said that the most significant day of my life was the day that I heard the story of The Horse. The story’s premise is that it is pointless to judge events as good or bad, because what often looks good can lead to bad and vice versa, what looks bad often leads to good. The day I heard the story was the day I began to transition from childhood to adulthood, when I began to understand the difference between black/white thinking and an understanding of gray, of nuance, that there are events and relationships that won’t necessarily be resolved and totally clear in the time frame that I want. This story has influenced my approach to my art, to my career, to my relationships, to my parenting, to my understanding of politics and world events. It has also made me continually curious to see how one thing leads to another!

I was about 20 when I first heard the story, on a sunny winter day in Jerusalem, Israel, sitting in an olive grove with a group of Israeli and Palestinian friends. The storyteller was an older woman, a Holocaust survivor, Re’uma, a name she gave herself after the war. Her name means, “see the wonder.” Re’uma had been a teenager in one of the camps. She had lost her entire family, and was on her own in the camp, looked after by lots of other prisoners. An elderly Rabbi, an adopted grandfather, told her this story one day, and she related to us all those years later that it changed her life. She credits this story with her ability to survive the camps, not physically, but emotionally and psychically.

The story changed my life as well. As cliché as it sounds, I remember the light bulb going “ping!” I remember looking around at the group of us sitting there, all friends dreaming about a Middle East solution that would bring peace to the region and it’s people. I remember taking a deep breath, and recognizing that the road would be long, that there would be events that would look really bad on certain days, but that those same “bad” events would lead to new events, and that eventually we would find our way to something better. (This was some 30 odd years ago, and the Middle East conflict was actually a little LESS complicated than it is now…but I still have hope!)

This is truly a concept that I think of nearly every moment of the day. Knowing that what I judge as bad may just be the doorway to something wonderful has been able to keep me going in every aspect of my life. In my parenting, I have to apply this equally in my relationship to my neuro-typical child and my child with autism.  In my professional life, there are always setbacks and then times when everything just seems to be clicking. And I’m sure the connection of this story to our current world state is clear to everyone reading this!

It often feels to me that people in the West are brainwashed into thinking that all days should be good ones, that life should be full of only pleasant events. It seems like people believe that having everything they want is their right, the way it is supposed to be, and that bad events are something to be ashamed of, something to be fought against. But we all know that life just isn’t like that, we’ve got good days and bad days. There isn’t a way to avoid the “bad” days, but there is a way to just roll with them, not fret about them, not add extra tension to an already bad day by being upset that the day isn’t going the way you want it to. It’s really hard to pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t!

When my kids were younger and would complain that they were in a bad mood, I would usually say, “That’s fine, you are totally entitled to be in a bad mood, but you still have to be civil to everyone around you. (Which is what I would like to share with various political leaders.) You don’t have to feel good to be kind. And just because you are having a bad day doesn’t mean that you get to pass that bad day on. But you are allowed to have that bad day.”

I am now at the stage of life where I am attempting to help my kids learn how to negotiate the professional world. There are so many things in the “professional” world that are truly hard to handle: racism, bigotry, greed, misogyny, manipulation for personal gain, backstabbing, and ego vs. teamwork, etc. etc. There are so many things in the “autism” world that are truly hard to handle: sensory meltdowns, family stress, being ostracized by the misunderstanding of surrounding people, coping with being different, being bullied, being labeled, being treated with condescension, being judged, etc. etc.

Teaching children resilience in the face of unpleasant events is crucial for any parent, but even more so for a child with special needs who’s starting point is one with so many more challenges than a NT individual. And guiding a young adult with autism into the professional world, where people aren’t always nice and don’t always have your best interests in mind is just one more training in the ways of the world.

I never saw the story The Horse printed until I wrote a song using the story, and went in search to see if it actually was a folk tale or if Re’uma had made it up. I discovered there is a version of the story in the children’s book, Zen Shorts by Jon J Muth, and in the picture book, The Lost Horse: A Chinese Folktale by Ed Young, in addition to many online retellings. I use this song regularly in my work with audiences of all ages starting from kindergarten-aged children.

Enjoy…. is it a good thing, is it a bad thing? We gotta wait and see what life will bring.