Why deny the obvious child?

I spent a great deal of my last December assisting at the holiday club programme run by a Forest School I usually do content and marketing work for. It’s nice when as a creative marketing consultant you can interact with the product from time to time.

This client’s “product” is the ever-changing beast of a landscape that is early childhood education. ‘The product’ – much like an octopus with not only 8 arms – also has multiple different little brains and personalities and can, from time to time, get unwieldy and emotional, but also deeply entertaining.

During December Holiday Club, 15 parents and/or grannies and nannies drop a hoard of 3-5 year olds off at a quaint little house nestled along the green belt in Constantia every morning for around 3 hours. The parental units leave and the well-skilled and, dare I say, infinitely patient band of forest school facilitators take over the reins.

I am there, in a similar capacity to David Attenborough, to just observe and play along with the wildlings, absorbing the spirit of forest school.

Forest school is an early childhood education model that encourages learning through play in nature. More specifically, deep learning through unstructured, often risky, play in nature.

Most days involve a smorgasbord of nature-based observational and interactive activities, creative crafts and tasks, running, building, jumping, rolling, climbing, story times and general undirected slow child’s play under the shade of several great big oak trees.

On this particular holiday club day, the kids were making animal masks. Real or imagined. A plethora of creative bits and bobs were laid out to facilitate their imaginations coming to life through colour, arrangement and glue.

One particular little girl had taken her cardboard mask to a nearby stretch tent area and was in the process of furiously scribbling oil pastels all over her two adjacently glued masks. The animal in her head apparently needed two heads. Beads were stuck on. Cork bits were blobbed in place. Leaves were poking out of the corrugated ruffle on the edge of the cardboard. And still the wild back and forth colouring continued.

Marina, we’ll call her, was not satisfied. Tufts of her hair were teased out of her ponytail. One sleeve was half rolled up. A pant leg too. Marina was also missing a sock and shoe on one foot. For all intents and purposes, she appeared to be deep into the warren of her making.

“Everything okay Marina? What are you making?” asked a nearby facilitator.

She stopped. Sat up right away from her project, her blue crayon clutched tightly in her right fist not unlike the grip on a garden trail hacking through stubborn roots.

“It’s a.. it’s.. I’m making a…”

We waited with bated breath and furtive shared glances.

Then with a great inhale and both arms raised high, she blurted

“It’s a vewy….. SOMEFING………. I-DUNNOO!?”

Snickers and giggles bubbled up from both our mouths.

A very-something-I-don’t-know. Yup. That’s pretty much what we’re all trying to do with our lives, Marina, I thought.

In fact, that’s been literally my WHOLE life. Trying to just do a VERY …..something….. ?I don’t know?

Picasso said we are all born artist. But I wonder whether we are not all born philosophers too?

In that moment, her comical display of impassioned honesty brought me great comfort.

She had inadvertently opened up one of philosophy’s greatest unknowables – what are we doing here? Any of us – be it in our jobs, our lives, or our creative projects and pursuits.

But she hadn’t only opened up the unknowable, but in not answering it – she answered it.

Namely that the creative process exists to exist. It is a doing unto itself. Doing it doesn’t necessitate an explanation as to where its going. Nor does making a thing require any form of succinct answer in order to justify what is being made.

To create simply is.

And sometimes it wants to move through us languidly and slowly, eked out over years. Other times it comes in a flurry of apparent chaos. The thing to do at that point is not to engage the mind in explaining it.

No. The thing to do then, is simply lean in, get crazy and go with the flow of making your very something I don’t know.

Just be the conduit. Let life move through you. And maybe in the process, loose a sock and shoe. Caring what we look like while we’re in our wild becoming is so overrated after all.

As Paul Simon sings, ‘why deny the obvious child?’

So, thank you, Marina.

For liberating me from some of the shackles of grownupness.