The seed for this idea comes from my wife, and last night I had an aha! moment that really pulled things together.
My son and I often take a soccer ball sized plastic ball to the park with us. He kicks it around and I follow in front and stop it for him because he often kicks it such that it rolls faster then he can run after it. Lately though when I stop it – effectively teeing it up for him – he has been yelling Papa! No! when I touch it. So I’ll not touch it for a bit but then it rolls too far and I feel bad for him and go and stop it or move it closer to him which gets me another Papa! No!
My aha! moment was the realization that maybe he wants to see how far he can kick it, or maybe he just wants to see what happens as it rolls and rolls and rolls. Either way, I was letting my compassion for what I thought was a problem get in his way.
This reminded me of some things my wife has said in the past along the lines of “imagine that you are in his shoes and have never seen this or done that before. What would you think it is, would it scare you, how would you interact with it?” *
This can be a very enlightening exercise, and so that is what I want to do with this category of posts here on the site. In their shoes will be comprised of posts where the exercise is to take something or some action and brainstorm what it could possibly be to someone who has no concept of the object or actions’ purpose or meaning.
* To relate a story when this topic came up, one night Alex opened the cupboard with the spices in it and proceeded to open many bottles and to smell them and taste a few. Imagine that you have never seen a bottle of spices before. He knew how to open a bottle, so that was easy, but what was inside? what was it for? and of course, being a toddler, what did it taste like?
