Zen and the Art of Retardation
It’s not so bad. I think about all the ways The Boy is how he is, and how he seems pretty happy. Sure, there is anxiety and learning difficulties and some hygiene things, but it’s hard to argue with The Boy’s outlook when he’s doing something so simple as throwing rocks.
And I’ve come to realize that we “neurotypicals” aren’t so different. Every time I tell somebody about The Boy’s tendency to ask about dinner in the middle of lunch, there’s a slight pause on the part of my listener, a shuffling of feet, an accounting of mental abilities, before she reveals that this is exactly how she makes dinner decisions — with a mouthful of lunch.
The Boy’s way of living seems pretty reasonable when you start considering that it moves from one simple joy to the next.
So I was trying not to fall into the Wise Simpleton thing, but what the hell, let’s think about this. Call it Zen and the Art of Retardation. How to uncomplicate your life, just for a little while. Let’s find the wisdom in The Boy’s life, and emulate it. Consider the monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s instruction in The Miracle of Mindfulness: When you eat an orange, just eat an orange. (I taught at a Spanish camp in Minnesota one summer and had to struggle to find things to say to counselors and kids in my limited lengua. For some reason, Eastern philosophy was easy to translate in my head. So one afternoon when I took the stage for a pep talk to the whole camp, I dropped this little bomb on them: “Cuando comes una naranja, solo comes una naranja.” Si.)
So here are the rules of becoming Boylike (or Girllike):
1) Enjoy the single thing. When driving, don’t think about the destination, the traffic, what’s going to happen when you get there. Just drive. Enjoy the feeling of movement, the chop of wind as cars go by. Imagine that there’s nowhere to go and nowhere to return to. It’s just you and the road, a function of mass and velocity. Howl.
2) Break a social norm. Go into a restaurant and make a scene. Get people to think you’re weird. Flail your arms, lie on the floor, wear a shirt inside-out and backwards into a party. Touch everything. Understand that society is a whole series of walls that we agree to believe in to avoid anarchy. Climb the walls, loudly. Enjoy standing outside the dominant social order.
3) Perseverate. One of the hallmarks of Fragile X and autism is “perseveration,” a form of obsession, a focusing of the mind on one single phrase or sound or idea. While for autistics it can be a distraction from everyday life, here you will embrace it. Find something totally trivial in the course of the day and then think about it intensely for as long as you can. Think of it as the most important thing to understand in the world. Pretend you can’t live another day of your life until you figure out how to say “Nobody puts baby in a corner” exactly as whatshisname did. Put a ball in your pocket and look at it every 30 seconds. Talk only about a handkerchief, a sport, a bar, a child, a line of dialogue, a number, a fruit, a lover. Do this until you leave everyone behind, including yourself.
4) Find your Om. FX and autistic folks often flap their hands or rock or do some other thing repeatedly because it’s stimulating or, I imagine, calming. It’s called “stimming.” Pick a behavior and do it (something tells me most of you already have something like this, some quiet private little stim you enjoy — playing with hangnails, running hands through hair, smelling one’s own odors). FX and autistic folks don’t like light touches, but enjoy deep pressure. Get someone to wrap you tightly in a blanket and sit on you. Find a tone you enjoy and hum to yourself.
5) Throw. Things. More than anything else, The Boy loves to throw stuff. Loves it. That’s an enduring montage in my mind, a series of images of The Boy at various ages throwing and growing: plastic toys, shoes, mom’s wallet once, golf balls, video game cartridges, more shoes, CD players, a desk, and rocks. Always rocks. We had a piece of property out in the country, a scrubby place of limestone and mesquite, a place where The Boy would spend hours whipping small stones into the brush or into one of a few small ponds. Just endless hours of manipulating matter and energy. And so shall you. Throw. Throw. Pick a thing, pick a place, pick a velocity and angle, and throw. After a while, so they say, you won’t be throwing the thing so much as the thing will be throwing you.
Oct 27th, 2009 1:34pm
