(You can listen to this email as an audio recording here.)
Hello friends,
I had a beautiful realization this week. Like many of us, I’ve been working on untangling the motives behind my need for my children to do certain things, enjoy certain others, and behave in specific ways.
This week, two things happened.
First this: my daughter loves to do stuff indoors. In 2021, I started slowly unpacking my obsession with getting outdoors every day and looking at how this was affecting my children. (I’m not denying outdoor time is important - let’s just park that thought here for a minute, and I may come back to it another day.) The truth is, my insistence about Penelope going outside every day was about a lot more than “being healthy.” And she knew this. It was tied up with internalized ‘it’s a nice day so we must make the most of it’ syndrome, stuff from growing up, and so much more which I’ll save for my endlessly patient therapist.
So - I basically stopped banging on about being outdoors. We talk about how it feels to be outside, how moving our bodies feels, I try to model being in touch with what my body needs, the way being out in nature feels to me, but ultimately I mostly don’t push it, or even advocate for it. If I need outdoor time, I take myself outside.
A couple weeks ago, I noticed my daughter taking herself outside occasionally - totally unsolicited. She said she felt like she needed it. I feel like this discovery on her part tells me two things - one, that if I back off, she will be more likely to figure out what SHE needs; and two, that my job is to celebrate who she is, not who I want her to be. She may never be into hiking and spending hours outdoors, but she will know the value of a relationship with nature, on her own terms.
Thing number two: the importance of writing. You must enjoy writing! And if you don’t - well, you must do it anyway because .. how will you learn to write otherwise?
Ok - without having to go into the complexity of this topic, here is my little anecdote.
This week, Penelope also said she has started to enjoy writing. She told me she used to do it because she felt like she had to (I love that she can admit this to me! and yeah, I’m not proud of this period of time, but I can be honest about it at least), and she thought it was interesting that since I stopped trying to persuade her to do it, she’s actually discovered she loves doing it. She made the connection herself! And wanted me to know she knows.
She’s working on several writing projects at the moment, entirely of her own doing. This of course makes me happy - I can’t deny it - because I love to write. But I also know this may simply a phase, and I can honestly say that is absolutely fine. She doesn’t HAVE to love writing. But the fact that she started to enjoy it AFTER I stopped trying to encourage her to write, is telling. The fact she started to take herself outside AFTER I stopped trying to get her to go outside, is telling.
So that’s what I have for you all today. Those two telling things.
Rabbit Trails.
So I was going to venture further into the depths of invisible learning and invisible history today, but I’m actually going to go in another direction.
A few days ago I listened to Sophie Christophy speak on the Rogue Learner podcast. I’ve been a long-time admirer of Sophie’s - if you haven’t read her writing I highly recommend it. I’m dying to get onto one of her courses.
The whole podcast episode is worth a listen, but the thing that struck me was when Sophie was talking about how she likes to learn, in response to a question, and she said this: she loves learning through pleasure. She specified that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the learning is easy, in fact it could be really hard, but the point is it needs to be enjoyable, it needs to bring her pleasure.
Pleasure-led learning! How is this different to interest-led learning, you might ask? Well, the short answer, for me, is that you don’t necessarily need to be interested to begin with, or for the thing you’re learning about to be one of your interests. This also means you can follow things like joy and curiosity even when at first impact, the topic is not something you’d usually be interested in. It removes that strict “interest” box from learning - it opens things up for us to find enjoyment in all sorts of learning, even if it doesn’t become an interest, even if it’s only temporary or short-lived pleasure.
This really spoke to me because learning has to be enjoyable, right? You might be learning about an interest you have, but the learning itself is dull or dragging on. Or you might be learning about, I don’t know, debt (mind-numbingly boring to me), but the learning itself might turn out to be enjoyable because of the people or the setting or the way it is presented.
Being led by pleasure and joy makes a lot of sense to me. It focuses on loving the process rather than the end result, and valuing the process itself - valuing the way something is being taught, the community you’re learning in, the medium of teaching and learning, or whatever else.
The question at the back of my mind is of course: but surely we will sometimes have to push through unenjoyable, unpleasurable learning to get to an end result, like passing an exam, or gaining a qualification? And if you focus only on pleasure, won’t you give up as soon as it gets tough?
I have two answers.
One: hard does not always equal unenjoyable. Peter Gray and Blake Boles both write about “hard fun”, like what many people experience in video games. Getting to the next level in some games is hard, but it’s pleasurable too. I love to quilt - it’s really hard and fiddly and confusing, I’m always learning, and never very good at it, AND I enjoy it immensely. Lorenzo plays golf - it’s objectively such a tough sport, and in many ways so unrewarding in the short-term, but he has fun doing it. He is pleasure-led.
Two: Yes, sometimes we will have to do unenjoyable learning for an end result - but I’d like to think this can be a conscious choice, and perhaps a choice that comes after we’ve gone deep into something that brought us pleasure. For example: Penelope loves history. It’s challenging, but at the moment it is mostly pleasurable for her. There may come a time when she wants to take an exam in it (hypothetically), and there will be parts of that which may not be enjoyable - but this will have come after years and years of pleasure-led history learning. So perhaps, the hours of pleasure she has derived from the subject will make the slightly boring, repetitive exam preparation not that bad in the end, or in any case ultimately worthwhile.
What I’m getting at is this: rooting our learning in pleasure is possibly crucial. It doesn’t mean that learning will ALWAYS be pleasurable, but it does mean that we will have a solid sense of why the thing we’re learning is ultimately enjoyable, that the less palatable elements will be grounded firmly in a sense of enjoyment and pleasure.
This could look so different if we had followed an interest because it was initially appealing, and continued to follow it in spite of it not ending up being so enjoyable, all because we were told that anything worth doing is going to be tough and unpleasant at some point, and we can’t give up just because we’re not enjoying it.
Following our pleasure *may* lead us with more certainty to something we ultimately want to stick with, even through the eventual unpleasant bits.
And yes, sometimes we’ll just have to do boring stuff, full stop. And perhaps having a life that is rich in pleasure-led activities might somehow “off-set” the boring stuff.
There’s a lot more to say about this, but I wonder what you all think?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week.
Fran x