I grew up with the following gymnastic moral advice:
keep your ear to the ground, your shoulder to the wheel, and your nose to the
grindstone. My parents, grandparents with whom I lived, and my teacher at the
one room school I attended peppered their daily words with adages.
Children truly were supposed to be seen and not heard. One could hardly argue
with such sage words as “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched” or
“Don’t cry over spilled milk.” “A wise man never makes the same mistake twice.”
Conversation ended right there with a statement of ultimate truth. Self esteem
issues were not a consideration.
If you wanted to talk about an incident at school, there was little
probing to explore the situation. “Not likely to happen again. You know, lightening
never strikes twice in the same place.” What seemed unfair to a child was completely
disregarded. “So what did you do first that started all this?”
I believe it was Garrison Keillor who said that no real conversations ever took place
when he was a kid. Adults just tossed adages back and forth to each other as they
related the community gossip of the day. Hard and fast rules for living were
reinforced among themselves and passed on to the youngest.
Perhaps the youth of today could use a little of this wisdom. Based primarily on
experiences of farm life or daily encounters with nature, aphorisms are hard for
kids to understand in terms of their present indoor lives. My grandson says, “The early
bird gets the what?” Perhaps there are no “idle minds” in which the devil can set up
workshop with everyone plugged in to television, video games, iPods, and cellphones.
But terse explanations of common sense simply are not around anymore. “Don’t
butter your bread too thick” reined in my stories of great exaggeration quickly.
People rarely bragged on their children (“If you brag before a pup, it never barks as
well afterward.”) Still grandparents could express pride and say smugly, “Cream
will rise.” Now there is a statement to bewilder my grandchildren!
Every culture has old sayings; metaphors succinctly capture meanings which would
take hours to convey. We need a balance between verbal capsules of morality
and the emptiness of everyone plugged in to their separate electronic devices.
There is no substitute for listening, giving examples of life learning from personal
experiences, cherishing questions and contributions from a child’s point of view.
The mind is developed through the exchange of ideas.
Today’s gems of wisdom come from laugh lines in situation comedies or from
celebrity sound bites. Maybe from commercials on television. Is this the
wisdom of generations we will pass on?
