Getting to the Centre
How do we get to centre? What's positive tension? Constructive conflict? I've been wondering about it - absorbing the coverage, employing too much judgement and not enough understanding, at times fretting about the campsite, about the kids' kids. Here's what I've hit on in the recent... a passively built house in Walton, Ontario, Laurel's work with Schulich students at York in Toronto, & the Empathy Toy.
The other night as I sat with Judy and Chris in their passive house on the outskirts of the outskirts in the middle of everything I felt the energy of the place. This house, the first of its kind out there, uses 90% less energy than the place they lived the year before, it runs on the power it takes to run 3 hairdryers. It's warm and comfortable, and smart, using an air-exchanger in ways that have the house the same temperature in every corner. Their cat came down for a visit - 'he's changed since living here,' Chris said. 'He'd never visit with people now he's visiting all of the time.' There's a peace to the place, an ease, there's a centre to it...
For a number of years now Laurel has been working with business students from the Shulich Centre at York. The course brings 35 or 40 high octane business students into the Theatre Dept. I've read cards she's received over the years from students who've taken her class: some declare it the most important course they've taken in their lives. One student's back aches went away, another stopped using pills for anxiety. It's a voice class. It's a class about being present, about breathing deeply, about being connected to yourself and the world around you. And in there is the centre - a place not traveled to often enough and a place, in the hurly burly, that we could do to travel to now...
I was introduced to the empathy toy at a conference a couple of weeks ago. The company that makes the toy say this about learning, empathy...We began discovering new heroes: like Brene Brown and Carol Dweck, influential researchers and storytellers who are working to change the way we think and feel about empathy and failure. We fell in love with Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century inventor of Kindergarten. He started his revolution with toys – or “gifts”, as he called them. His approach hinted at a question that is the cornerstone of our work: Why not use toys as tools for social change? If “schools kill creativity” as Sir Ken Robinson has stated, what if toys could bring it back? What if toys were the new textbooks? Because toys can teach what textbooks can’t: creativity, collaboration, and most importantly – empathy.
Getting to the centre, 3 examples, a house, a teacher, and a toy. Not sure how things are going to play out in this dusty world but I take some solace knowing that Chris and Judy, Laurel, and Ilana Ben-Ari, are out there in the centre inspiring me to attempt my own journey there.