Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I wanted to explore wandering and pondering. Giving children time to wander, giving them time to ponder, giving them that kind of spaciousness to be able to deeply absorb what it is that they're interested in, and the questions that come up for them in life, and the inquisitiveness, and allowing space for that inquisitiveness, that wandering, that pondering.
And how do we allow space for that? Because it's out of that that children come into this world, right? They explore this world a little bit, piece by piece by piece. It's like they're little stepping stones of pondering into this world, where they become so interested in the simplest little thing. In spring, the bud, and the question comes up about why does the bud form like this? I wonder what kind of tree this little plant is going to be.
Is it going to be a tree? Why are some bees bigger than the others? Look at these daddy, because all that, all these wanderings and ponderings, usually begin with a question. And that question usually comes out of noticing. So when a child's noticing something, the question, they wonder, they ponder, the question comes, they wonder again, and then explore.
It's just this beautiful little sequence of events. Now, in stark contrast to having the space for children to ponder, and to question, and to savor that question that's forming within them, we tend to now, because we can, we tend to now YouTube it, or Google it. It's fast.
It's quick. It's kind of cheap. It's easy.
We don't have to go down the library. It's right there in our hand. And it's kind of magic, because then you can get videos about it.
You can see all kinds of other things, and you can, and a child's just so fascinated as they sit beside you, looking at the bee's wing, and a microscopic view of a bee's eye, and so on, and so on. And, and, you know, it's, I guess it's okay-ish. But it's a far distant second to a, to sitting with a child, and wondering with them.
And having, for example, having a wondering notebook, where we write down or draw down our wonderings. And, and, and over the week, we collect up our wonderings, and then we talk about it. Or, you know, and the children will do this, right? It'll come up again at dinner.
And then in the morning, they'll wake up and say, you know, Mommy, I'm still thinking about what kind of tree that might be. Because, and so they're, they're diving down into, and, you know, and no small thing, they're myelinating their, their brain, as well, through doing this. It's incredibly helpful for neural development.
But it's, it's a slow, open, open-ended, wide aperture way of absorbing information. And to know that information, that I can figure this out, and I can put this in my I Wonder book. And then at the end of each week, we go to the library.
And we, and we go to our friend, the librarian, who we know very well. And we show her our wondering book. And then she says, well, now, I have just the thing for that wondering.
Now, this is not just for very young children. This could be for like an eight, nine year old, who's been wondering about how the pyramids were built, or how, you know, and all kinds of different wonderings. You know, they're slightly more advanced than little child's wonderings, but still they are.
And then, and through a human process, working with a librarian, or talking to someone, you might be able to say to a child, well, do you know what, I think I know a person who can tell us how bricks are laid in a very straight line like that. Because on the way home from school, maybe you were walking through the neighborhood with a child, and they saw and they get to a big municipal building, and they see this, this brick work, which is in a perfectly straight line. And then it goes up in an arch.
And, and your child's thinking, how could you possibly make an arch of bricks that don't fall down because they're so heavy. And it could be that a friend of a friend is a bricklayer, or a friend of a friend is an engineer, or someone you know, or the neighbor, the retired gentleman, who is a former who was an engineer, whatever it is, you know, you reach out a little bit into your community. Now, will a child learn as much like fast and a lot of fast facts? Probably not.
But those fast facts are cheap. They come, they go, and they don't really dwell in the hippocampus. They don't really dwell in the in the brain and in the child's inner being, their soul, their inner being.
Because they're fast. It's the fast food of information, very low calorie. And you need more and more and more of it because it has so few calories.
Slow learning is is good, nutritious, organic food style learning. And when we can allow children to have this emergent process of learning, you give them this lifelong love of inquiry, of learning, of pondering, of wondering, and not, and you don't coach them up to have any kind of question, which has a really quick, you know, very fast, down and dirty answer. And now we move on.
That's that that kind of shifting attention, this, this question, answer this question, answer this question, answer is not good for a child's attention. It's not good for their for their impulse control. Having a child be given the gift of wondering and pondering, and then slowly emerging, and even if the answer doesn't come, sometimes, let's say a child is wondering about that brick arch.
And they're wondering and wondering and wondering and, and an answer doesn't come at all quickly. But then one day, you come across a book and you remember and you were a magazine and you say, Hey, I saw this picture. This is how they did it.
Oh, my, look at this. And together, you can sit down and just marvel at at at how this feat was carried out. This is a child with good impulse control.
This is a child that will go into being a deep well learner, because it takes like those old fashioned wells, where you wind a bucket down, down, down, down into the water into that beautiful, clear water down at the well, and then you wind the bucket up. That deep well learning is not well served with YouTubing with Googling. Because it's just winding the bucket a few little turns down and winding it up.
And there's nothing much in it. There's no content. So my hope for for us all as parents is is that we honor the the wonder of wondering.
Okay, bye bye for now.
