I had known for years that I wanted to do public speaking, but I did not feel that I had any way to prepare for the actual experience. It is one thing to outline a talk, or pace around your office practicing that talk, but another thing altogether to stand in front of a group of strangers and deliver it. What seems like a good idea in your imagination is not always such a good idea in reality.
When the moment finally came I felt a bit as if I were being asked to walk a tightrope without a net. My opening joke, which had seemed so clever to me on the plane ride over, was met with puzzled silence. For the first ten minutes, I spoke as quickly as I could, believing that any pause would be read as symptomatic of an unprepared performer. But I soldiered on, and got a few laughs, and slowed down, and the crowd and I gradually warmed to one another. Midway through the talk I made a point with a quick anecdote, just as I had practiced it in my office. It seemed insufficient to me, and so I decided to tell a story to further emphasize the point. I chose one of many stories I had catalogued in my memory. As I began telling this story, telling it more or less as I had told it to my friends and family, to my wife and coworkers, I realized I had been mistaken about my lack of preparation. This talk was nothing but a series of stories, and I had been telling stories since I’d learned to talk, editing them, improving them, learning from them. Stories were how I communicated with the world. I had actually been preparing for this moment my entire life. I was reminded of a strange sound Sawyer used to make. For a time, when he was pretending, Sawyer would run back and forth, humming, thumping his chest, and, periodically, crying out, “Ack!” Whenever I heard it, I’d flinch. I hated that sound. I hated it because it wasn’t a word, and because it made no sense to me, like so much of what he did. It was an abnormal sound, a sound out of place in the world, just like him. Then we bought some stop motion animation software that allowed one to animate figures using only a web cam. Sawyer wanted to animate his Transformer trucks. He was meticulous about it. We spent two hours bringing them to life in a battle of Good Truck versus Evil Truck. Once we had our footage, I suggested we edit it. “Can we add sound effects?” Sawyer asked. Of course we could. We downloaded some sounds of engines roaring and grinding metal and tires screeching. Sawyer told me exactly where the sounds belonged and exactly how loud they needed to be. “This came out great,” I said. “We’re not done,” he said. “I need to add the voice.” These weren’t normal trucks, after all. These were Transformers, trucks that could walk and talk. So I grabbed a microphone, plugged it in, pressed record, and Sawyer leaned into it and belted, “Ack!” It was the perfect sound for a talking truck colliding with another talking truck. It was as perfect as the screeching tires and grinding metal. It belonged in that movie the way my stories belonged in my lectures. Once we were finished, Sawyer hopped down from his chair, ran outside, and commenced pretending. Sitting by the computer in the kitchen I heard him cry, “Ack!” again, and I did not flinch at all.
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I was standing with Sawyer at the pet store where we volunteer once a week when I noticed a father and his young son near the wire gate used to keep the cats we oversee from escaping into the store proper. It’s a freestanding gate, and the boy discovered that if he pulled on it the gate would tilt toward him. How interesting! He pulled some more and it tilted still further. The father noticed and touched the son’s arm and set the gate back to standing. The boy began pulling on it again, and the father righted the gate once more and gently nudged his son toward the fish tanks.
It had been years since I’d cared for a child that age, and I’d nearly forgotten this constant dance. All the boy knew was that pulling on the gate was interesting; it was the father’s job to know that the gate was meant to remain upright. So the father intercedes, as he will when the boy raises his voice in the library, or pulls candy from a grocery store shelf, or wanders toward a busy street. This dance has as much to do with preventing the child from the disturbing the order of things, as teaching that child that such an order actually exists. All at once I understood the root of the most common conflict between Sawyer and me. When do I stop righting gates for him? It was simpler with my older son, who through his grades, and his manners, and his sense of humor demonstrated that he had an understanding of the Established Order and could operate comfortably within it. Sawyer, meanwhile, not only has less awareness of this order, but is frequently contemptuous of those parts of which he is aware. “Why can’t I say whatever I want to say?” he asks me. “People are too sensitive!” There might actually be less conflict between us if I had a deep reverence for what I perceive as the Established Order – but I do not. I have lived much of my life feeling penned in by other people’s feelings over which I have from time to time accidentally trampled in my efforts to express what I believe to be The Truth. I have pulled on many a gate in my life, and not enjoyed the ruckus that followed its crashing to the ground. Yet ruckus is only noise, and when quiet returns so does the true order of things in which I can decide if I want to stand that gate or leave it on the ground. I have reached that uncomfortable precipice where I must largely let Sawyer pull on as many gates as he wishes. While I prefer peace to discord, agreement to argument, I know too that there are plenty of gates in the world that ought to come down. Who better than these kids we have called autistic to pull on them, who have proven by their mere existence that our definition of a meaningful life remains too limited? That definition can have no limit. Such a limit pens every one of us, standing between us and our life as we are meant to lead it. When I say that no one is broken, I mean that no one needs to be fixed. This does not mean, however, that I believe everyone should remain exactly as they are. Quite the contrary. If working with my son Sawyer has taught me nothing else it is that the question is not if things will change in my life but how they will change. Or, more specifically, how can I be a conscious participant in those inevitable changes, rather than a victim to a tide of changes that seem beyond my control?
For me, the answer was to abandon the idea that anything needs fixing. This was not so easy because I am constantly aware of conditions in my life with which I am dissatisfied or with which I disagree. If I don’t like something, I want it to change, I want it to improve, and something that has been improved has been made better has been fixed. That’s the way of the physical world. Except it isn’t. For instance, once upon a time I very much wanted Sawyer to stop running and flapping and humming and start communicating with us when we spoke to him. His constant pretending, as we called it, was a problem that needed fixing. It made school nearly impossible and it made parenting nearly impossible. Problem. And that problem was in him; ergo, he needed to be fixed. Our efforts to fix him, to improve him, to correct him inspired no change other than to drive him deeper into his pretend world. It was when we found joining, which was the practice of doing whatever he did with him, that we began to see the sort of changes we so desired. Yet joining was not fixing. Joining was a way to offer Sawyer another option in a language he could understand. The option we were offering was the experience of being with other people, and the language he could understand was the thing that he was already doing. Things changed, but nothing was actually fixed. Just as there is nothing wrong with Sawyer, so too is there nothing wrong with me. But just like Sawyer, I am always seeking new experiences that better match the life I would like to live. Those new experiences become my expanded perception of what is possible, and from that expanded perception I will seek still more experiences and perceptions. But not if I try to fix myself. Why would I want an expanded version of a broken thing? No matter how wretched I sometimes feel, no matter how compelled I feel to right this wrong that has led me to this wretched place, it is only in my appreciation of what is that I can find what I love and seek more of it. It is easy to seek more of what I love; it is impossible to eliminate what I do not. I did not fix Sawyer; I simply sought more ways to be with him rather than try to eradicate the ways I could not be with him. I am constantly relearning this lesson. How contrary it seems that I must love the thing I wish to change. Dissatisfaction and criticism and judgment and even violence seem like perfectly reasonable responses to a wretched world. And so I try them, and so they don’t work, and so I feel so wretched that I have no choice but to seek one thing in this wretched world that pleases me, and there it is, and now I am on my way again. Though I did not understand it at the time, joining Sawyer was my first spiritual practice. Joining, as I have described earlier, was the practice of doing whatever he did, which in our case was running back and forth humming and flapping and thumping our chest. The idea was that instead of telling the child to stop doing what he was doing and join you in the “real world,” you join him in his world and see where it goes from there.
I did not see it as a spiritual practice because, A) I didn’t know there was such a thing; and B) all I was trying to do was get him to spend less time humming and flapping and more time acting like what I believed was a normal kid. This wasn’t so easy. The real challenge in joining wasn’t doing what he was doing, but not judging what he was doing as wrong. This meant that even though I wanted conditions—that is, Sawyer’s behavior—to change, instead of pouring my efforts into changing those conditions, I instead changed my perception of the conditions. Or in other words, I had to learn to change what I actually had the power to change. Because once my perception of Sawyer changed, once I said to myself, “What if he isn’t broken? What if I’m not broken? What if no one is broken?” conditions did change—namely, my behavior. Then, lo and behold, once my behavior changed, so did the world around me, including Sawyer’s behavior. Moreover, I saw that if I judged humming and flapping as wrong as I hummed and flapped, Sawyer would go into another room to hum and flap in peace. If I didn’t judge it as wrong, he’d stay with me. Which meant that even the effect my behavior had on the outside world depended entirely upon the perception from which that behavior was born. This is why joining was a spiritual practice. Though the world seems full of conditions that appear to need changing – from children’s behavior, to police departments, to rioting cities – my job is not to correct all those conditions until they suit me. My job is to correct my perceptions of those conditions and then behave accordingly. I have to admit that this seems like a dangerous choice sometimes, like walking through a warzone without my helmet and bayonet. I pay attention to those conditions precisely because they threaten me. I must remain vigilant and alert, ready to correct conditions with a bayonet thrust or a letter to the editor. Such is the perception from which a world of enemies is grown—enemy nations, enemy weather, enemy children. It is an intolerable world, a world begging for change, a world no one would choose to live in if they believed another world existed. No One Is Broken could have been told as the story of how a father (and mother) saved a son. Things were looking dark for this little boy until they began joining him and not judging him. It could also be told as the story of how a son saved his father, how the act of not judging this little boy allowed this man to pull himself from his own darkness.
But the truth is no one saved anyone from anything. To be saved would be to suggest we were somehow in danger, that one or both of us were balancing on some precipice beneath which lay suffering without return. I admit there was one night when I perceived myself as having edged up against just such a precipice, and that if I were just a little carless I might fall from life forever despite wishing to remain upright. What I came to understand about that suicidal cliff is that I only reached it because I believed it existed, that the very belief in suffering without relief immediately creates suffering from which the only relief is disbelief. If that sounds circular, it often felt that way to me. In those early years, when we were first joining Sawyer, there were times when it was as if I were seeing him through some funhouse mirror—one moment he looked broken to me; the very next he did not. All that changed in those two moments was what I was thinking. If I thought he was broken he looked broken; if I did not think he was broken, he did not look broken. The question, it turned out, was not how to save him or fix him; the question was how did I want to see him. If I did not want to see him as broken, then I could not think that he was broken, I could not believe in brokenness. As a parent, it is tempting to view such a choice as an elaborate excuse to bury your head in the sand, that the job of the parent is to remain ever vigilant to quietly mounting threats. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I do not think there is anything wrong with burying your head in the sand if you are seeing a great many threats. Sometimes you have to close your eyes to see. My only job in life, whether I am a father or a son or a husband or a writer, is to perceive the world without threats. Only then will I know how to take action and move forward in a way that is in alignment with life, rather than dodging landmines of my own invention. Living in this way becomes a practice in trusting what you do not see. I see landmines all the time. They seem quite real and ready to blow me into a thousand unrecognizable pieces. That’s a deathless moment when I step into that trap anyhow. Blow me up, I say. I’d rather be a thousand pieces in the wind than live in a world full of enemies and bombs. End it if you must. And so I step, and every time I do something else dies in me, into whose space life quickly returns. |
William Kenower
I am the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, and Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. Learn more here. Archives
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