Let Go, and Make a Difference

Human nature wants to change the world, when taking it easy makes the difference.

Still, people stump for a local politician to win a key race, or they join a club to carry the banner for a worthy (or worldly) cause. Men and women seek a means for fixing something, their displeasure with anything in the world.

Most of the time, I believe that this desire to remake what people see on the outside merely reflects a man’s frustration without what he sees within. There are a lot of things that we can criticize or despise about our lives. We don’t make enough money, for example, or our current station in life is inadequate. If my mother or father had done this or (had not) done that, then I would have ended up doing something more or less in this life.

Frankly, much of our dissatisfaction, I am convinced, comes from a sense of demand following our innate, obsessive need to compare ourselves with others, a drive in humanity which refuses to rest.

Instead of making the most with what we have, we want to remake what disturbs us in others.

The problems we face often have nothing to do with what we think needs to be improve, but our inner resistance to letting events follow their natural course.

I still tutor once in a while, and one child I worked with, a first grader, was struggling in class. The teacher complained that he acted up, talked too much. After some counseling with a site counselor, the parents put their son on medication to calm him down.

After two session with the kid, I noticed that he was actually quite bright, and he ably completed the teacher’s assignments, plus a few activities added by me, without too much trouble. When I talked with his mother, I learned that this first grader was competing with twenty-nine – twenty-nine! – other students. Five years ago, school districts could afford to maintain a twenty-to-one teacher student ratio, and even then teaching first graders was a challenge.

The kid didn’t need medication. He was simply surrounded by a loud, demanding environment with fewer resources. Besides, the mother was a nurse, and her two-fold intuition had informed her that there was nothing clinically wrong with her son.

She took him off the medication.

The next few sessions, I noticed how she frequently corrected his spelling, and even pre-empt her son from making mistakes. “Mom”, I told her. “You have to let him fail, so that he can learn to correct himself.”

Towards the end of my time with the student, his father would bring him to our tutoring sessions. While I worked with his son, catching up on homework and testing him with more challenging material, his father was quietly reading. Once, when I wanted to show the father his son’s improvement in coursework, I had to call him twice just to get his attention. Whatever his son did, the father affirmed his son’s efforts.

By the end our time together, the son was reading at a second-grade level and earning significantly higher grades in his class. I noticed especially that he did much better when his father was sitting nearby.

Some would criticize the father as distant or uninvolved, as compared with the mother. I disagree. Relaxing and letting a child’s learning take place with force or reproach makes a world of difference. That need for patience, however, can try our capacity. We tend to forget the conflicts resolved without fussing or busyness. Learning to let things proceed naturally, without intense intervention, can produce better results.