Crawling Towards Understanding

I've had my first two classes at CIIS—Human Development and Psychodynamics.

Human Development is interesting to be taking right now in my life with kids. My house is already "ages of man" between the infant, child and adult man...Still, it's going to be great to get the expert background on all of these stages and changes.

I loved what the Instructor said about "development". He said almost all the problems he sees in his own practice are matters of people in one or another stage of life who are not managing to achieve the developmental task of that time. He spoke about himself and said when he should have been starting relationships and thinking about what work he'd like to do around ages 18-20, he was at an ashram in India meditating, and he then struggled because he did not have those things that he wanted so much.

At first I felt irritated when he spoke about development—I suspected it was a set of social conventions that people had to rigidly follow. (And what a deranged society to be giving out conventions!) There was also that word I hate, "adjustment"—which seems to imply that all the originality and weirdness of people has to be flattened out of them so they can become conventional and boring. But as he spoke more about the "tasks" of development, they began to seem more individual and creative to me. I mean, it made sense that 18 year old kids should be falling in love for the first time—it doesn't seem like what they HAVE to do but instead like what I hope they get to do. And everyone can do it so individually. It is all made new each time. Other life tasks to accomplish: learn to control your bowel movements; figure out what gender you are (well, I'm not as sure about this one): face dying with courage.

He also told us about a miserable New Year's Eve he spent alone on a bench in Central Park, only to come out on the street and come face to face with John Lennon. The man's eyes, and his look. Ah. He said it should remind us that just when you think everything is at its worst, something amazing can happen. I've been playing "Beautiful Boy" for Rye a lot, since he was born. I love, "the monster's gone—he's on the run—and your Daddy's here..."

Finally, he had us do a short, guided meditation to try and dredge up our earliest childhood memories, and I got to remember this amazing thing. I found a memory of crawling! Being on the floor, about six inches away, and crawling on my hands and knees. So visceral and clear. But nothing else. A good thing to have access to as my own darling Rye Whiskey starts to get motivated about crawling. he's revving up on his hands and knees, doing his bends and thrusts and just generally meditating seriously on "over there".

Go Rye!