Experiencing the world through others’ senses

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of our rabbit (a white lop with brown patches around his nose, eyes, and on his ears) sitting on our blue couch

Watching our rabbit sniff and scratch at the floor, I wonder what he’s experiencing.

From reading Ed Yong’s brilliant book An Immense World, I know our rabbit’s sight alone is far different from ours. Rabbits don’t have the cone in their eyes that distinguishes between green and red, so they’re essentially red/green colorblind. Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, they have much better peripheral vision than we do, but don’t see particularly well straight in front of them. And that’s just vision – his sense of smell and hearing is likely far different from mine in a way that’s hard to comprehend.

Yong talks about how we try to force our sensory experiences onto other animals and assume they experience the world how we do.

But the fact is, we do it with people too. I just have to put on my husband’s glasses to be reminded of how radically different the visual world is for him. (I have glasses too, but I merely get a headache without them – he can barely see a couple of feet in front of him.) Or watch my kids slosh the unicorn slime from hand to hand that touching it makes me shudder. While all humans have approximately the same sensory systems, we still have radically different experiences of how our bodies take in and process that information.

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Respecting all types of family time

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Photo of two white boys cuddled together on a giant bean bag, both playing separate Nintendo Switches

“Nothing is wasted in nature,” I whispered to myself as I dumped moldy strawberries in our composter.

I despise wasting food. There are so many things wrapped up in the production of our food – from how farm workers are treated to the amount of fertilizer used – that throwing it away feels a bit like sacrilege. But we bought far too much for our Christmas fruit salad and the extra got shoved back in the fridge with the other holiday leftovers. So into the composter it had to go.

I at least had the solace that this food wouldn’t be wasted – it would break down into good compost to feed our garden next fall. Just like the fallen leaves in the forest feed the insects and fungus, which in turn feed the roots of the trees and other plants.

In fact, this is idea that nothing is wasted in nature is a mantra I’ve been trying to adopt in life far beyond our composter.

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Valuing play for our children and ourselves

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Photo of a young white boy holding up his hands above his hands, with a white wall showing a shadow split up in rainbow colors

Reading the plaque on the wall at the National Children’s Museum, I raised an eyebrow. I had been looking around while my kids climbed on the huge structure rising up two stories in the middle of the museum. The sign on the wall caught my eye, so of course I read it. It had a little blurb about the skills children would learn from using said giant climbing structure – like problem solving and teamwork – and careers that used those skills. Although I was nodding along at first, I stopped and thought, “Wait a minute! Why are we so worried about them learning specific skills, much less for a career? Why can’t we just let them play?”

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Finding magic in everyday life

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Photo of a large stuffed owl with glasses next to a small stuffed owl appearing to read a large version of a book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

Whoooooo loves reading Mo Willems books to their kids? Props to my local library for setting up this adorable little scene behind the check-out counter!

I talked to one of the librarians and she said that it just happened to come together organically – someone left the book there after story time, someone else put the big owl there, then someone fished the glasses out of Lost and Found and put the little owl next to the big one.

It just shows that creating little bits of magic and wonder don’t have to be a big, preplanned thing. Magic and wonder will show up if you keep your eyes open for them, whether that’s my younger son playing “monster school” or pretending to shoot each other with laser beams on a spaceship.

When everything and nothing has changed in being a parent

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Photo of a Chinese-style lantern of an alligator next to a tree wrapped in purple Christmas lights at night

An empty changing table. But in my mind, my memory, it wasn’t empty. There was a child on it, an excitable, squirmy three year old who was potty training – slowly. A shock of recognition went through me – he was that young last time we were here, wasn’t he? Had it been that long? Yes, it had.

I was standing in the bathroom of a favorite cafe – a place I hadn’t been since COVID started. We were on our way to the Zoolights event at the National Zoo – an event they hadn’t held since COVID started. And when COVID started, my kid was a toddler and now he’s a kid. Not even a “little” kid – just a kid. It was strange how time had jumped like nothing at all.

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Weaving climate change discussions into everyday life

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Photo of a kid in a blue fleece jacket (my son) and older man in a green sweatshirt (my dad) walking down a hiking path with trees on both sides

Warm weather in January stirs up a lot of ambiguous feelings in me. On one hand – it’s beautiful out! On the other – it’s probably because of climate change! (It’s also called climate chaos for a reason – the up and down unpredictability is part of it.) And back to the other hand – we should enjoy it while we can! In reality, it’s probably a combination of all three.

Bringing kids out in nature and modeling enjoying it is one of the best ways to build lots of emotional and physical skills as well as environmental awareness. You don’t need to get all apocalyptic, but it’s also a chance to draw attention to how it is unseasonably warm and how the climate affects it. You can get curious, asking your kids what they think we can do to help. (It’s very possible they’ve already discussed it in school.) We don’t want to put the whole burden on them though, so be sure to talk about what adults (including yourself) are doing, like Indigenous water protectors fighting oil pipelines or Black and Hispanic activists working to close coal and natural gas plants in their neighborhoods. And of course, all of the people working to build renewable energy!

If you want somewhere to start, check out the Family Climate Justice toolkit I created with Raising Luminaries.

(I originally wrote this post on New Years’ Day and posted it to social media then.)

Holding our feelings as we want our kids to hold theirs

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A photo of a Chinese-lantern style owl

Many of us tell our kids that all feelings are okay, it’s how you act on them that affects people. But how often do we apply that to ourselves?

When we attended Zoolights at the Smithsonian Zoo, I was a little disappointed that they got rid of most of their traditional string light animals and replaced them with the Chinese lantern-style animals. At first, I shoved down the disappointment and thought “just enjoy it, Shannon.” But then I realized “no, I can be disappointed. It’s okay to be disappointed.” And accepting that freed up the headspace to actually enjoy what they had.

Holding those contrasting things in tension – that you can be disappointed and enjoy what’s there instead or knowing that our kids are tiring and we love them dearly – is really difficult for us as humans. Our brains want to simplify and eliminate ambiguity. But it’s a really valuable skill for parenting – which is full of ambiguity – and life.

Slowing down for sustainability

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Photo of a crescent moon between the branches of a bare tree

I always want to look up in wonder when someone says “Look, the moon!” and teach my kids to do the same.

Even if you live in an area with a lot of light pollution, we almost all share the moon. Watching it shift through its waning and waxing cycles is a beautiful way to keep in tune with and respect the cycles of nature.

Taking time to notice and truly gaze at the “everyday” things in nature – from the moon to dandelions – is both something that kids are naturally good at and provides us adults joy in rough or busy times. Slowing down doesn’t mean coming to a halt – it can just mean finding time for small pauses. It means noticing the things we wouldn’t otherwise. It can teach us to be more sustainable to both ourselves and our wider world. The more we can look beyond our individual worries, the more we can care for and accept care from those around us.

On holding expectations loosely

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Photo of a model train going past a model of a farm in Mali made of plant parts

Sometimes, plans don’t work the way they should the first time. But that doesn’t mean they will never work, just that you need to adjust. As someone who gets stuck on expectations, this can be really hard. But it’s almost always worth it to figure out how to make it work.

Every year, we do an activity Advent calendar. For the past several years, COVID has prevented us from doing many of the activities we’ve done in the past, including the train display at the U.S. Botanical Garden. I found out that they finally relaunched it this year, outdoors. But the one day we could do it overlapped with a really important meeting of one of my older son’s extracurricular activities. So that was a no-go. But we were able to go after Christmas – not ideal, but better than nothing. And so we went the week of Christmas break, which worked out beautifully.

This lesson *may* just apply to far more than planning activities. When we hold on our expectations too tightly – whether to who our children are or what we do with them – we miss out on what is possible. As hard as it is to come to terms with what is not, it’s so much better to embrace what is.