Big Ideas for Curious Minds, page 7
for several years, and lived near Boston for most of his life—although he
also travelled widely, spending time in France, England and Egypt. He
was a great public speaker and gave many lectures to large audiences all
over the United States. Emerson was a very kind and gentle man, and was
much admired by the president at that time, Abraham Lincoln. Emerson
bought a little house in the countryside, near a beautiful small lake, and
his friends used to come for long holidays to visit him.
Emerson was interested in how the good things we admire often have
drawbacks. For instance, if you are very clever you will probably also be
lonely because other people won’t understand you. Or, if you have a lot
of money you will most likely also have a lot of responsibility. And if you
are famous, many people will envy you and you might not have many true
friends. Emerson didn’t only think this about people. Cheetahs are the
fastest land animals—they can accelerate faster than a racing car—but
the things that make them so quick, such as being light and thin, make
them weak in other ways. A lion, which is much slower than a cheetah,
can easily steal a cheetah’s food just because it is so much bigger and
stronger. Emerson even saw examples of the weakness as strength theory
in non-living things. For example, a city that is extremely beautiful, like
Venice or Paris, might get so crowded with tourists that it’s actually not
very nice to visit. By looking at these strengths and weaknesses, Emerson
was pointing out something that is quite sad but also very important:
nothing can ever be perfect.
BIG IDEA #15
You probably haven’t heard the word ‘kintsugi’ before. That’s not very
surprising, as most people won’t have—though they might have heard
about what it means. Kintsugi is a Japanese word, and you say it like this:
kin-tsoo-gee. It’s made up of two smaller Japanese words: the first part,
kin, means ‘golden’, and the second part, tsugi, means ‘fixing’. When you
put the two together, it means repairing a broken thing in a beautiful way.
This might sound like quite an odd idea, at first. Normally, if something
gets broken, you feel like it has been ruined. You might want to throw
whatever it is away and get a new one. But not with kintsugi.
Kintsugi started a long time ago in Japan. The ancient Japanese people
loved vases and cups, and they had a tradition of making very beautiful
ones, but because they were so fine, they were delicate and they got broken
easily. Most owners immediately threw away the broken ones and went
out shopping for new ones. But, in the middle of the 16th century, someone
had the idea that rather than just throwing away the beautiful pots, cups
and bowls, they should try to fix them. People began to fix their broken
ceramics, but instead of sticking the bits back together with clear glue,
they started to mix the glue with gold dust. This meant you could see very
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clearly where a pot had been repaired. By doing this, they weren’t trying to
pretend that the cup or vase had never been broken—they were making it
very clear that it had been fixed. They were showing that they didn’t mind,
and that it was OK to keep hold of something that had once been broken.
Kintsugi is a big idea. It started from a very small thing—fixing a broken
cup—but the same idea can be used for thinking about more important
things as well. It is not just cups that can get broken, or bowls or toys
or televisions. Actually, the most important things that can get broken
are people. When people break it is a funny kind of breaking—it’s not
just the physical breaking of bones or hurting your body. Breaking can
also happen if you get very angry and say something horrible, or if you
do something mean. When this happens, you feel as if you have spoiled
what was nice and lovely about yourself. Maybe you feel like other people
won’t want you anymore.
But you can mend yourself in the same way that the kintsugi cups are
mended. When you feel sorry about what you did, and say sorry to the
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person you hurt, it is a kind of mending. You are repairing your feelings.
You do not forget that a difficult thing has happened, and you are not
pretending that you never said or did that thing—but you’re making it
better and fixing the problem.
When you make up with someone it can become better than it was before.
After you have made up, you can feel sure that an argument will not mean
the end of a friendship, and that makes the friendship much stronger.
You know, too, that you can be angry with your parents and explain what
the problem is and put it right—and that can make your relationship
with your parents better than it was before. Knowing that feelings can be
mended is very helpful. Sometimes you can’t help hurting other people’s
feelings, and sometimes they cannot help hurting yours. That is never
nice. But you don’t have to worry about it so much if you keep the idea of
kintsugi in your mind.
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Make a list of things — other than cups and glasses — that could be fixed.
For example:
Using colourful patches to mend your favourite jeans
Fixing a friendship by apologising (and really meaning it)
Yourself—think of all the times you’ve fallen over or failed
a test. These aren’t anything to be embarrassed about!
They help you learn and have made you who you are.
Around roughly two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a philosopher called
Siddhartha Gautama was born in Nepal (where the Himalayas are). He is
better known as Buddha or The Buddha. You have probably heard about
him before. Buddha was a prince and his family was very wealthy. When
he was growing up he had a very luxurious life—if it was too sunny, he
even had servants to hold white umbrellas over him so he could play in
the shade. But he wasn’t happy. There was so much suffering everywhere
in the world. Even insects get trampled on, he noticed.
So when he grew up, Buddha asked himself a very tricky question: how
can you stop suffering? One big idea he had was that we should accept
that things will never be perfect. People will misunderstand us, we will
make mistakes, our friends will sometimes be annoying or mean, our
plans won’t work out, it will rain when we want to play football, we’ll
spill hot chocolate over our trousers, we’ll get a cold on the first day of
the summer holidays. We do not want them to, but we are alive on this
earth, and these sorts of things are unavoidable. Buddha encourages us
to accept these things, rather than getting annoyed by them. If we always
want things to be perfect we’ll end up being very frustrated and much
more sad than we need to be.
Buddha loved the idea of repairing things instead of just throwing them
away. He thought that if something was old and worn and broken, you
shouldn’t see that as a bad thing. Many people were inspired by Buddha’s
ideas, and some of his followers, particularly in Japan, got very interested
in how slightly damaged things can actually be very beautiful—just like a
teddy or soft toy can become much more important to you when it’s old
and loved, and has lost some of its fur.
BIG IDEA #16
It is not very nice being nagged. Someone will keep on telling you to do
something; they keep on asking you, ‘Have you done it yet?’ and the more
they ask the more you don’t want to do it. Sometimes you might nag too.
You might nag your parents to get a dog or to take you to the cinema to
see a film you really want to see. You could ask them every day (or ten
times a day) and they never seem to say yes. Although lots of people nag,
the funny thing is that it does not work very well. Even if someone says
yes eventually, they feel like they have been worn down and forced into
something they do not actually want to do. No one really likes nagging,
and no one really likes being nagged.
So why do people nag? Basically, the nagger is trying to get someone to
do something. They are trying to persuade another person. If you nag, it’s
because you really want something to happen—you have an idea in your
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head about how important something is or how nice something could
be, and you want the other person to agree. You want them to understand
what you understand.
The problem is that nagging isn’t a very good way of getting anyone to
understand anything. Nagging is like very bad teaching. Imagine you did
not understand how to do a new kind of sum in maths. A very bad teacher
might keep on saying, ‘Why don’t you just do it?’ They’re not explaining.
They’re not really teaching you at all. They are just nagging.
The big idea here is that when people do not do what others want it is
usually because they don’t understand properly why it is important. The
nagger knows something is important—but they’re not explaining why
it is a good idea, so no one understands, and no one does it. If you nag or
pester or keep on about something, what you are really trying to do (but
are not actually doing) is teach someone about what you think and feel.
It can be a bit of a surprise to think that you could be the teacher. Usually
you might think of a teacher as someone older who has a special job
teaching people. But really, teaching is something that everyone needs
to do sometimes. You are a teacher whenever you help someone else
understand something—but it might be tricky because adults have not
usually spent much time teaching you how to be a teacher.
Think about the best teacher you have ever had. What did they do that
was so good? Maybe they were very good at listening to you—they didn’t
just tell you things, but heard what you had to say. Or maybe they asked
you a lot of questions, which means they were trying to find out why you
didn’t understand something. Probably this good teacher was also very
patient—if you didn’t understand something, they would not tell you to
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be quiet or say you were stupid. They were probably enthusiastic, too, and
were really excited about sharing ideas with you. Or perhaps the most
important thing was that they didn’t make you feel bad for not knowing
something already. A good teacher remembers that you cannot know a
thing until someone teaches you it—so if you don’t know something, it’s
not because you are stupid, it’s because no one has been a good enough
teacher yet.
So, you probably already know quite a lot about good teaching, because
at some point you’ve had a good teacher. You can learn how to be a better
teacher, too, by learning from them. Remember that if you are being
nagged, someone is just trying to teach you something—and remember,
too, that if you want to explain something to someone, it’s better to teach
than to nag.
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What other things can you think of that might be changed from nagging to teaching?
Look at the examples below and then write some of your own.
“Go and tidy your room!”
“Hurry up, you’re going
to be late!”
“You’re being a pain.”
“Tidying your room will
make it easier for you to
find your things.”
“Being on time shows that
we appreciate the people or
things we’re going to see.”
“Why do you think you’re
acting like this?”
In the 18th century there was a philosopher who lived in Germany called
Immanuel Kant. He looked quite odd—he was very small and a bit of a
hunchback. His family were extremely poor, but he was good at learning
and got a job in a university, where he was a very popular teacher. He
went to so many parties that his friends worried he wouldn’t have time
for writing books, but he got up really early in the morning (at five a.m.)
and did his writing then. He was very neat and tidy and loved making
little rules for his life. He always went for a walk at exactly four o’clock
in the afternoon and he had a rule that he had to tell jokes when he was
eating a cake or ice cream at the end of dinner. Kant loved gazing up at
the stars on clear, dark nights: it reminded him that he was very small
and the universe is huge.
Kant hated it when people ordered each other about. He thought that the
most important thing was to understand why you have to do something
—you should not do something just because someone has told you to,
but because you see for yourself that it’s a good thing to do. So, if we want
to get other people to do things, we have to explain properly what we want.
We have to get them to see for themselves why it is such a good idea.
Kant thought that if something really was a good idea, then other people
would be able to understand why it’s worth doing it. If you teach them,
you won’t have to force them.
BIG IDEA #17
How other people think about you depends a lot on how you look. This
is quite a strange and sometimes difficult thing to think about—but it’s
also very important to discuss.
If you happen to look cute and innocent, other people (and especially
adults) probably think that you are a very nice and well-behaved person.
That might not actually have very much to do with how you feel inside, but
they don’t know that. If you look messy and crazy, that’s probably what
other people think you are like, even though you might really be quite
careful and thoughtful.
If that doesn’t sound very nice, it’s worth remembering that you probably
think the same things about other people sometimes. If you don’t know
someone very well, you probably guess what they are like as a person from
their appearance. All you have to go on when meeting someone new is
what they look like—you do not know anything about what’s going on
