Kids Don't Need to Practice Being Present

We have a bird feeder hanging near our Japanese maple tree. It's been there for a while, and most days nobody pays much attention to it. The kids get home from school, I start getting snacks together, and whatever is happening on the feeder happens without us.

But the other afternoon, one of the twins was staring out the window and said, "Come see!" A cardinal was sitting on the feeder, this bright red bird just eating seeds in the afternoon light.

The three of us stood there and watched. My other daughter whispered, "It's a cardinal." And then nobody said anything else. We just watched until it flew away.

The whole thing didn't last long. There was no activity planned, no conversation about what kind of bird it was. They already knew. We just stood at the window together.

The Frog in the Pond

I recently read Will W. Adams' A Wild and Sacred Call, a book about our relationship with the natural world. In it, Adams tells the story of how Bashō, the Japanese poet, composed what might be the most famous haiku ever written.

Bashō was sitting with friends in a garden beside a pond. In a moment of silence, a frog jumped in. And with what Adams describes as "lucid clarity and astonishment," Bashō composed:

The old pond
a frog jumps in
Kerplunk!

— Translated by Gary Gach

Something small happened, and he noticed it completely. Adams writes that Bashō didn't just observe the frog from across the garden. He disappeared into the sound. There wasn't a listener and a sound anymore. There was just that one vivid moment.^[1]

I think about my daughters at the window. There's no active learning activity. They're just there, watching a red bird eat seeds. Kids do this all the time and don't even think twice about it.

What Kids Already Know

Kids don't need to practice being present. They already are. They will stop in the middle of a walk to examine a crack in the sidewalk. They will crouch down to watch a line of ants cross into the grass. They will spend five minutes examining a rock they found in the driveway.

Rachel Carson, the naturalist and author of The Sense of Wonder, wrote that "if a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder... he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."^[2]

I love that she used the word companionship. Not instruction or enrichment or guided discovery. The adult's role isn't to explain the cardinal or turn it into a vocabulary lesson. It's to stand at the window too.

Relearning

Adams writes that these moments of complete presence "cannot be created by force of will."^[1] You can't schedule stillness or add it to a to-do list. It shows up when conditions are right, usually when you're not trying.

I've been practicing yoga for a while and reading more about presence and attention lately. What keeps striking me is that my kids already do what these books and practices are trying to teach. They don't need a framework or a breathing exercise. They just pay attention to what's in front of them, fully, without planning what comes next.

I'm the one continuously relearning it.

When I stand at the window with them, I can feel the pull of my next chore or to-do. But I just stand there and watch the same bird they're watching. The afternoon gets quieter. And for a couple of minutes, I'm not thinking about anything except a cardinal on a feeder.

My kids gave that back to me. I don't think they know they did.