Which Comes First, Wisdom or Wonder? A Short, True Story

This story is dedicated to the ones living the long, hard search, as we speak/write.

“Such a condition of emerging man; such was the life of an animal limited at first to pure sensations, scarcely profiting from the gifts that nature offered him, and a long way from dreaming of wrestling anything away from her. But difficulties soon presented themselves that he had to learn to overcome: the heights of trees which prevented him from reaching their fruits, the competition with animals who were seeking to eat these fruits, and the ferocity of those who wanted to take his life over them-everything required him to apply himself to exercising his body. He had to make himself agile, a fast runner, and vigorous in combat. Natural weapons-tree branches and stones-were soon found at hand. He learned to overcome natural obstacles, to fight other animals when necessary, to contend for his subsistence even with other men, or to compensate for what he had to cede to the stronger.”

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Whenever I’m jolted awake around 4am, to the sound of a small, black silhouette in my doorway, I know that it’s one of my kids and I know that they’ve had a bad dream. It doesn’t happen too often anymore now that my mental health has improved so much, but when it does, it’s usually because life has become a little bit more stressful than usual or after we’ve had an especially bad day. If it’s the smaller outline of the two, I know that it’s my son, and I know that he’ll need to talk to me for a while. And in his low, little, middle-of-the-night voice, he’ll say to me, “Mom…I had a bad dream.”

“Okay Marcus, come on in” I’ll say.

Then I’ll pull the covers down beside me to make a small inviting space for his little wee body to lay as he scurries across the floor to my bed. He’ll always crawl right over top of my half-asleep body, squishing me with each one of his movements, as he feels his way through the dark into the space that I’ve made for him. I’ve encouraged him several times to climb on from the other side, so as not to squish me, but he never remembers. I don’t mind though. I know he forgets because of how upset he is, and he only weighs about forty pounds anyway.

If I’m not already facing his direction, in his low, little, middle-of-the-night voice, he'll say “Mom, can you face me?” (that’s how I know he wants to talk). Then, he’ll cup each one his soft, little, five-year-old hands around either side of my face in the gentlest way a person ever could, and proceed to initiate a dialogue with me, that will typically go a little something like this.

“Mom, are pirates real?”

“Um...The pirates in your dreams are not real. They used to be real, but they don’t exist anymore. Ah...If you ever see a cartoon pirate on TV, those pirates are not real. There are lots of people who like sailing ships out at sea though.”

“Ah...Mom? What if I get lost at sea and the waves swallow me up whole?”

“I would never let that happen to you Marcus. If you were out at sea, I would be out there with you, protecting you. But if you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of us being out at sea together, then we won’t do that.”

Marcus asks me a lot of questions about reality. I always take these questions very seriously considering my own history with mental health and feel very protective of the realities that I’m building with my children as they grow and change. Furthermore, “reality” has been a tough topic for me in my life, so I like to be very specific with my answers because I know that Marcus also finds it challenging to differentiate between what is real and what is not real. I know just how deeply these answers will impact his understanding of the world… much, much more than I wish I knew.

The thing that most concerns me, is the thought of my children falling into the same thought patterns that I did when I was young. I don’t want my kids to be afraid of their own thoughts, like I was. I don’t want them to ever feel like their thoughts are controlling them. I say to them, “Your thoughts are not real life. They are just thoughts, that’s all. You are separate from your thoughts. They don’t control you and you don’t ever need to bring those thoughts to life if you don’t want to.”

Marcus doesn’t usually feel quite settled with just one or two answers after a bad dream though, so if he’s still feeling a bit jittery, he’ll keep me engaged by asking me another series of questions, less dream-related, and our dialogue will typically go a little something like this.

“Uh, Mom? What kinds of nuts did the cavemen eat?”

“Uh...Well, I guess I can’t say for sure...but I assume, whichever type of nuts grew naturally in whichever area it was that those early humans were roaming, I suppose.”

“Uh, Mom? What kinds of berries did the cavemen eat?”

“Um...Well, I guess whichever type of berries grew naturally (yawn) in whichever areas it was that those early humans were roaming, I suppose. Uh...Probably ones that taste a lot like the berries that you enjoy, like raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries… and probably lots of other types too.”

“Um, Mom? Did the sabre-tooth tigers eat the cavemen?”

“I’m not really sure Marcus. Uh...I think, early humans became quite skilled at running, jumping, climbing, and hiding, just like you, so I think they were very good at finding safe places to hide from sabre-tooth tigers and other predatory animals...but sabre-tooth tigers have been extinct for thousands of years now.”

“Uh, Mom? Is poison real?”

“Um……y…es, poison is real, though...I, myself, don’t know much about the properties of poison. There are other people who are experts on this topic though, I think. Uh..I've never been that interested in learning about poison myself, so I guess that’s why I don’t know very much about it.”

“Uh...Mom? Can black widow spiders kill humans with their poison?”

“Um...I don’t really know a lot about black widow spiders myself… I think they do carry venom, but it doesn’t kill humans from what I understand. Ah...We don’t have any dangerous spiders where we live. That’s one of the reasons why I like living where we do. I think that the dangerous spiders prefer to live in other areas of the world.”

“Like the desert?

“Ah...yes, like the (yawn) desert.”

“Ah...Mom?...Ah...Do anacondas have poisonous venom?”

“As far as I know, anacondas are not venomous…but I could be wrong about that...maybe I could confirm that for you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I want you to check about that on your phone tomorrow…hey, Mom? Have you ever heard of a blue ringed octopus?”

“Um….no…I don’t think I’ve ever heard about them…?

“Um, so that one’s really dangerous k? It has tons of venom and it’s a reeeeally, really scary kind of octopus. They're like yellow coloured, with all these like purplish spots on them…so if you ever see one of those ones, do not touch them k?”

“Wait…purple spots or blue spots?”

“Um, like purply-blue spots with like a big dot in the middle of the spots.”

“Okay, I’ll definitely stay away from those ones, I’m glad you taught me about them.”

When he finally feels satisfied with all the answers that I’ve given him, he’ll turn onto his back and fall asleep beside me for another hour or two. I love listening to the gentle sound of his 5-year-old snoring, as I drift back to the sleep too.

During these middle-of-the-night moments, it will always be a variation of questions related to dangerous things, poisonous things, animal predators, things that he worries about. Questions related to nature, the elements in nature, natural disasters or something in and around that general area. Almost, always topics which I have the least amount of knowledge in. Always.

The questions Marcus asks me, are usually questions that he already knows the answers to. You see, he asks me these questions to see if I know the answers to them. Marcus has already decided that the prehistoric ages, animal predators and deadly insects are three areas that I need to extend my knowledge in. I think that he likes to ask me questions that he already knows the answers to because not only will they be answers that he’s expecting (if I actually do know the answers), which might be somewhat comforting for him, but it will also bring him comfort to know that I know the answers to his questions about animal predators and deadly insects so that I can keep myself safe from them and through that, keep him and his sister safe too.

Marcus is like me, in that, if he gets an answer that doesn’t make sense to him, he’ll keep asking that same question until he gets the one that does make sense to him. It's really as simple as that. And like me, this search for truths will never end, as long as we both shall live.

When I was little, I asked a ton of questions too, but mine were always related to human nature and human behaviour. I wasn’t as concerned with nature when I was little, nature didn’t scare me as much. Humans on the other hand, did. Terribly, in fact. From my point of view, they were another category entirely. So, I needed to get to the bottom of them, first and foremost. I was a kid who was always watching, staring, trying to understand who I was looking at. I wanted to make sense of all their facial expressions and how those expressions went along with their words. Every single person was an entirely new identity (an entirely new set of confusing expressions) to figure out and the worst part of it was, that I could never find any patterns that brought me a real sense of contentment...ever. Furthermore, I never seemed to get the answers that I was looking for when I asked all my human-related questions (likely because I asked them at very “inappropriate” times and/or settings and was probably making one or more people feel uncomfortable, per time, now that I think back on it….).

I, myself however, never once, felt uncomfortable asking those questions… not...even...once.

But alas, I never got the answers that made sense to me, so I kept searching and searching and searching……

Down, down, the rabbit hole I went, down, down, down…

The further down I went, the more lost I became, until one day, my search finally came to a startling end.

...I don’t even like thinking about humans individually anymore. I went from being highly obsessed with them, to being utterly detached from this obsession…almost sickened by it even…so very, very, quickly. I absolutely and completely exhausted them as a topic. In fact, I don’t even like thinking about categories of humans anymore, unless it’s thinking that’s specifically related to the study of politics, political environments or political philosophy, in which case...I love thinking about them.

It’s my personal belief, that most humans know in their hearts which answers feel right. For a few though…it may be very, very difficult to know which answers feel the most right. This can be especially tough for those ones, I think. Those humans may have to search a little longer and a little harder than most others do unfortunately. And so, to those ones...the ones on the long, hard, search...I say to you, “Slow down. Slow way, way, way down for a long, long time. Be alone with yourself for as long as you possibly can and listen very, very closely to your heart…then...ask yourself all of the questions that you have been so busy asking others and you may find that you already know the answers that feel the most right to your questions. Those can be your answers. You don’t have to be the one with the other answers…nobody has to be that one.”

I think people love searching for the one person who will give them all the answers they know feel right. However, as they go on this search for that person, along the way, they will meet lots and lots of people who do not give them the answers they know feel right. And so, to the people who already know what answers feel the most right, I say to you, “If you already know very clearly, what answers feel the most right but are unwilling to share these answers openly, do not spend your time punishing the ones who don’t know these answers yet." Those ones will be able to find the answers that feel the most right to them, much quicker, if you stay out of their way.

I never heard any creation stories when I was little.

That’s not the order that I learned about the world. Humans and nature didn’t belong in the same category of thinking for me. They weren’t even in the same sub-category. They were always, entirely separate categories. In my brain, humans were the terrible things that were destroying nature and I was one of those terrible things. It never once occurred to me to consider myself a part of nature or to connect these two categories in any meaningful way. I didn’t do this until three years after I had given birth to two children of my own.

When I started connecting these two categories however, I began to think about myself as a part of nature and the world began to make more sense to me. My existence became much more purposeful. I began to feel connected to other humans in a way that I never did before. I stopped looking at them because I wasn’t confused by them anymore. I started to notice all the ways in which we were the same, rather than observing the world from the perspective of an outsider, making endless comparisons between humans and I, which never got me anywhere.

I guess I learned about life in "reverse" order, you could say. I gained an understanding about the world before understanding my purpose, I became a social being without the power of reasoned speech, I did all my elementary and secondary learning before I could look at things objectively, I had kids before having an identity, I didn’t start learning about animal predators until after giving birth to 2 humans that I needed to protect and now I'm learning to think at a level much higher than my ability to speak.

I don’t really believe that there’s a “right order” to learning though. My order wasn’t easy but I connected all the dots eventually.

When I realized that I was pregnant with my first child, one of my very first and deepest fears about the entire thing, was that I wouldn’t know the answers to my own kids questions. I knew that I didn’t have a strong foundation of factual knowledge in place because school had not been easy for me in the past. But happily, having kids is exactly the thing that helped me to re-discover my love for learning and as soon as they began voicing their wonders about the world, we started searching for the answers together and now I walk with them as equals through life. They are “nature” and I am “nurture” and we go together as one for now.

We don’t have a faith or a god or a higher power, but we each take up purposeful space here on earth, same as everyone else.

If I somehow manage to live long enough to become a little old lady and can sense my time is drawing near, all I really hope for in those last final moments, is that I have just enough mental strength to conjure up one final memory in my mind, a memory that I know, for sure, is real. I wish to be able to close my eyes and take myself back to my younger self, in the dark, in the middle of the night, with my son cuddled up close beside me. Then I'll feel his soft, little, five-year-old hands cupping both sides of my face and saying to me, in his low, little, middle-of-the-night voice, “Mom, are pirates real?”

If I can make that memory come to life, even for just a second or two…I’ll be ready for anything.

By: Heather

Note: This story was inspired by Part 1 of Thomas King's audio lecture series titled The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative and by the Second Part (which is my most favourite part) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality, published in 1755. It was after I read this part, that I really began trusting Rousseau and his words.