My four-year-old, Emerson, was playing with the rainbow colored plastic slinky that he had bought with game tickets at the local pizza place/arcade. He was having a great time stretching it, swinging it, distorting it into different shapes. Until, of course, the inevitable happened: the slinky suddenly became a mess of tangled plastic and Emerson carried it to me, cradled in his small palms like an injured bird, saying, “Help! Help! I can’t fix it.”
Of course, as soon as he had started playing with the thing I had begun mentally cursing the inventor of the slinky, and my initial response was the imminently unhelpful, “Yep. That happens. Pretty much every slinky I have ever seen has ended up that way.”
The suggestion that this problem was not unique was, for some reason, an even greater insult to Emerson than the malfunction of the toy. His frustration moved into full-blown tears and yelling, as he insisted, “No! That’s not true! This has never happened before!”
It was one of those moments that most of us with young children face several times a day. Tears, fits, complaints over something that, to our adult minds, seems trivial, absolutely nonsensical. I am often tempted to just walk away, give up. I can’t help you with this, kid, and I really don’t want to listen to your wailing. More often than I like to admit, I give in to that temptation—let them struggle through something on their own because I don’t have the emotional energy or the will to struggle through it with them.
In this case, I happened to have my laptop sitting open on the coffee table in front of us, so I said, “Let’s see if other people have had this problem. Maybe there is something online that can show us a way to fix it.” As I entered “tangled up slinky” in the google search box, Emerson perked up, wiped his tears, and asked, “Is there a video?” And of course there was a video—several, in fact, most of them posted in response to queries about how to help a crying four-year-old. I had always thought of slinkies as short-term toys, best thrown out once tangled, but it turns out they can be untangled with some patience, working slowly, spiral by spiral. Emerson watched with interest as I began this process, then drifted away to play with Lego mini figures. I was skeptical. My initial tugs and twists only seemed to make the problem worse and I doubted I could get this tangled mess back to its original state. But I committed myself to just sticking with that single strand of plastic, following it where it went.
As I worked, one circle at a time, finding my way through the knot and gradually restoring the neat coil, I realized this was yet another version of the lesson I have been trying to learn for most of my adult life. You have to move along the path in order to know where you are going. You can’t always envision an end result, or goal, or destination, but the process of moving is worthy of attention and effort. It’s one of those ideas that is a cliché, but one based on deep truth—one day at a time, there is joy in the journey, peace in every step.
The version of this truth that is in my head most often these days is the Theodore Roethke poem, “The Waking.” The poem actually has slinky-like qualities, in the way that it uses the villanelle form to spiral back into itself with the crucial repeated lines, the way the seeming contradictions in the poem can expand and contract the meanings of the words. The final stanza of the poem runs through my head many times a day:
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The last line, especially, is almost a mantra. It is my answer to most of my worries and uncertainties. How will I teach this new class? How will I ever get my novel written? How will I help my boys through all of the large and small frustrations and hurts that await them in life? I learn by going where I have to go.
I am trying to accept this truth and learn by going, learn by taking the tangled up slinky of life and making some order of it, spiral by spiral, even if I have to start over with a newly-knotted slinky every day.
