Despondency is spiritual crabgrass. It chokes out joy, generative activity, hope. If you want to get rid of crabgrass you need to dig down deep enough to tear it up by the roots. Whence despondency? What are its roots? There’s an old saying about “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”. The despondency that cripples most people (even without their realizing it) isn’t necessarily the result of one crushing event, but can be the result of the accretion of a thousand small indignities, disappointments, and disillusionments… little straws.
They begin to accumulate when we are very small. We are born utterly dependent, and while the universe may seem to revolve around us – our slightest whimper results in the all-encompassing comfort of mother – we haven’t the awareness to be culpable of the narcissism necessary to feel indignant. Once we develop a rudimentary consciousness, our first experiences, along with moments of the Aha! of discovery are suffused with a sense of our own ineptitude. “Aha! Look! Uh-oh, wait a minute … I’m lying here, barely able to hold my head up and that lovely piece of lint I’d like to suck on is six inches in front of my nose and six months out of my reach. Whaaaaaaaa!” And so it goes, over and over again, a mingling of scintillating delight and howling frustration, discovery and our inability to act on it.
With mobility and the advent of language and the rudiments of rational (versus purely emotive) thought, our frustration is compounded by confusion. This confusion is bred of a welter of contradictory information – our own experience versus the apparent hypocrisy of the adult world.
It begins with simple admonitions like, “Don’t touch that! It’s hot!” and the preemptive snatching away of the child’s hand from the flickering flame that the child so wanted to grasp, moth-like in his determination. A little indignity might nestle in their hearts, but little children still believe adults implicitly. They have to; adults are gods among them, and their lives depend on it. Then too, adults do things that to children are impossible and are imbued with a kind of magical essence. Opening the way to a distant place by fiddling with the dull golden orb that’s slightly out of their reach – now that’s magical to a 1 year old! Lacking language in its fullness and the skills of reason, as children we believe what we are told, and take things at face value. We are terribly literal minded when small, but not for always.
Because the inherent drive toward growth and independence (the twin nemeses of childhood ineptitude), is fueled by the delight of discovery and is girded by puckish determination, the seed of fortitude, the cycle continues: discovery, ineptitude, frustration, experimentation, admonition, indignation, experimentation, contradiction, confusion, discovery … until the child realizes it’s NOT hot, or at least, not always, and he gets the sneaking suspicion that the god-like beings in his life have feet of clay after all. More and more frequently, with his sidelong glances, rush for the stairs when no one is looking, and shrieks of glee when found out, the child proclaims to the adult world, “Hey, I’m inept, not stupid.”
Adults must cultivate children’s sneaking suspicions, the first buds of the skills of discrimination and skepticism, and give way before the growing capabilities and consciousness of the child. The myriad occasions that confirm his ineptitude must be countered by a growing body of evidence of the child’s own power, control, judgment, and grace. To not do so is to undercut the roots of independent action and to sow the seeds of despondency. It also becomes paramount that adults consider carefully what they say, especially to an older child, for often, the very words meant to help a child flourish are poison.
Adults will often say things like, “You can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough,” thinking to encourage a child, and yet have no idea what the child hears when they say it. As previously observed, when an adult says something, a child is likely to believe them, especially if it seems to grant the child his fondest wish. But when the adult says you can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough, the adult has left out several important caveats. The adult means you can be an accountant or a lawyer or a teacher (or maybe a cowboy), but a child wants to be Spiderman or Sailor Moon or Goku. Of course, once it becomes apparent that one’s Halloween costume does not imbue one with the power to climb walls unimpeded or perform some other fantastical feat, reality necessarily intrudes. Unfortunately, because of a lack of clarity of meaning, reality is tainted by disillusionment. Not only does the adult lose credibility and the child doubt himself, but reality loses something of its luster too.
Even becoming one of the lesser gods of our society – a movie star, a rap star, a Nascar driver – is beyond most of our reach. Yet because we’re told if we try hard enough we can, and they seem real enough, we hope for and may even work towards that end. Again, when we discover we aren’t able (“I haven’t the looks”, “I can’t keep a beat”, “I drive like my grandmother!”), the initial feelings associated with mistily remembered, subconsciously recalled inept childhood are confirmed. Because of our repeated experiences with the casual disregard for clarity of meaning or an inaccurate assessment of reality, both of which lead to false hope and self-delusion, the balance is tipped away from fortitude into despondency.
Over the years, we build up a store of disappointment and disillusionment that we will refer back to time and again as evidence that we are incapable, inept. Eventually, our initial indignity becomes quiescent, and the essential skills of discrimination and skepticism learned at the knees of the adult world’s casual hypocrisy take on their darker forms, prejudice and cynicism. Hopeful fortitude, the willingness to soldier on in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds caves before the onslaught of our own self-doubt.
© Magdalen Jago 2008
