sidewalk chalk
Watching a little boy draw a race track on the sidewalk with chalk, outside my office window: a box outlined with “start” in the middle in a stereotypically cute, childish scrawl… a line that goes out from the start box and midway changes from pink to white because his pink sidewalk chalk died.
It made me quite happy to see.
I remember when we were kids, how important it was for us to feel that we were doing things, making things, having a sense of agency. How adult it made us feel to build things, to create. It didn’t matter whether it was a fort or bicycle ramp or a “dam” in the little stream across the way, or a hopscotch board on the sidewalk. We had projects and we undertook them with the deadly seriousness of 8-year-olds.
We knew in our hearts that it was silly to act so serious, just like we knew when we were pretending to speak German that it was all a lie. But it was a lie we embraced and decided to forget. We knew in our hearts that everyone else knew about the lie, too—but by consensus, we kept quiet, and enjoyed the charade.
We were playing at being adults, in a non-obvious way. We were pretending we had the power to make things happen and control our universe in at least some small way, if we wanted—just like adults did.
It seems to me like that is something sadly lacking from the play kids engage in today. The dependence on technology worries me.
How will they develop that physical sense of doingness? What will happen to them when they grow up and realize that, of all the experiences where they felt the blush of achievement, only a tiny handful existed outside of the dreamland of a video game console? What will happen to the world?
