Itwas mid-December. The snow had been falling steadily all week with drifts making little tunnels on the roads and sidewalks. It was the wet type of snow, with big flakes that make for the best snowballs and snowmen.
I was walking home with my then five-year-old son Jonas* from kindergarten, laughing, catching snow on our tongues, and throwing snowballs.
Like you do.
Along the sidewalk, we noticed something dark, and not moving. My son’s first instinct was to go over and look closer, gently prodding it with his toe.
It was a cat. Obviously dead, as it was lying in the snow, completely still and its belly was burst slightly open. It hadn’t been dead for very long because it wasn’t covered by snow yet and wasn’t fully stiff.
Rather than be repulsed, Jonas actually bent down and looked closer.
“I wonder what happened it?” he asked me.
I answered that as it was a black cat, a car probably ran over it because he didn’t see it in the dark.
“I know what happened,” he decided, ignoring what I just said, “he was climbing that tree over there, trying to get a bird, and he slipped and fell, and then a car hit him.” From my logical mind, I mentioned the tree was on the other side of the road about 25 meters away.
“So?” he replied, “He could have fallen down from the tree and hurt his leg because it’s slippery, and then the car hit him because he was limping and couldn’t get out of the way fast enough.”
Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have had a chance.
Here came lesson one.
1. Always be curious and open to possibilities.
“One of the fundamental keys to success and inner-peace is to be open to the infinite array of possibilities in your life.” — Wayne Dyer.
What Jonas just showed me was the power of imagination and curiosity to create seemingly impossible or highly unlikely solutions to a question, in this case, how the Cat met his Maker.
It illustrates one of the major differences between child and adult thinking processes. Namely, the ability to see or generate many different possible answers or solutions to a question. This is also known as divergent thinking.
Because this skill or ability is essential for creativity, in many top-level digital and marketing companies, it is as valuable as technical or management literacy and qualifications.
If we don’t exercise it, our ability diminishes as we get older.
Ken Robinson describes this graphically. 1600 kindergarten children were tested over a period of 10 years for divergent thinking. They were asked questions such as how many different ways they could think of to cook an egg; or how many uses they could think of for a paperclip. Genius-level thinkers were able to come up with over 100 different ideas/solutions to these questions.
Of the children who were tested aged three to five, 98% showed genius levels. By the time they were aged eight to ten, 32% could think divergently. When the same test was applied to 13 to 15-year-olds, only 10% could think in this way.
Researchers believe this is primarily due to our education and cultural programming. We are taught through repetition at school, that there is one way of doing things, the answer is at the back of the book and it is what we will be examined. Society teaches us to mimic others at the expense of individuality and independent thinking.
When we lose this ability, we lose our curiosity and also the wonder and awe that curiosity brings in exploring and connecting with the world around us. We are a speck in an incomprehensively vast universe of countless billions of planets and stars in millions of galaxies, that have no end.
Keep being curious, no one knows enough to be a pessimist.
…
Making a grave and a grave marker.
Jonas decided we HAD to make a grave for the cat. There and then. With no tools, in the dark and worsening snow storm.
Ignoring any divergent thinking, I said we didn’t have any tools or anything to make the grave, the ground was hard and it was a public roadway.
From this came lesson two:
2.Don’t think about ‘perfection’, stay in the process.
Jonas proceeded to scoop away snow from the drift with his five-year-old hands until he reached the frozen grass below. When he had scraped a hole big enough, he lifted the cat carefully and gently placed it in the hole.
Then he covered it back in with snow. He broke a small branch into two sticks and found some leaves and small stones. With these, he made a small cross and bouquet and placed them on top.
Done.
He taught me that anything done with the heart or with love is perfect.
In order to create, we have to ignore others, or the “ideal” that others would expect but rarely create.
Just go with our instinct and creative voice, use the resources we have, and forget about inner or outer voices telling us it’s impossible or can’t be done. There is no risk because it isn’t about risk, it’s about answering the question “how will I do this?”.
A good example of this is when Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur, and engineer — announced the X Prize of $10 million for the first person or team to build and fly a reusable spaceship into space twice in 2 weeks.
He wanted to open up space to people. Reusability was important because of costs and sustainability.
NASA and big corporates like Boeing and Airbus said it was impossible, it could never be done, and it would take huge multidisciplinary teams of thousands, along with billions of dollars in research.
8 years later Burt Rutan did it. It cost $25,000 and a team of 30 people. When asked, he said “I didn’t listen to what others said couldn’t be done. I had my own vision and thought NASA’s myriad failures are in many ways the natural consequence of a catastrophic combination of bureaucracy, monopoly, and a calcifying aversion to the kind of risk necessary for innovation. They are scared to take risks which are needed for any kind of innovation or genius.”
Without risks, there are no mistakes and without mistakes, there is little or no learning. Without instinct and creativity, there is no risk. When we listen to others, we allow ourselves to forget our own ingenuity and risk-taking action, so we effectively kill the process before it has even begun.
Jonas showed me that he wasn’t even thinking of risks or courage, he was just using ingenuity and creativity to solve something he really wanted to solve, with the resources he had.
3.Don’t dwell or hold on to things. Let them go.
As we walked home, I had my hand on his shoulder. Apart from the awe and gratitude-filled wonder at what my son had just shown me, I took the parental chance to make the episode into a learning experience. I reminded Jonas of the importance of always looking in both directions before crossing the road, and of wearing brighter clothes when it was dark.
Because look what happened to the cat.
He seemed thoughtful as well, digesting what I had told him. “Dad?” he pondered “Yes, captain?” “Do you think Spiderman could beat a shark?”
*not his real name
Thanks to Ntathu Allen (she/her)
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
 What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Raoul Droog on Unsplash
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