Opinion

Mental Growth Doesn't Just Happen

By TAMMY HANSEN SNELL

September 18, 2007

It hardly seems possible for my daughter to be in her senior year of high school, when my own senior year seems so recent.

I have crystal-clear memories of attending classes, planning for college, and looking forward to how good it would feel to have a calm, assured, grown-up voice in my head instead of the uncertain explorer who lived there.

Somehow, I had the illusion that I could reliably plan on occasional upgrades to my mental voice. By 20, I’d have a handle on the complexity of my own warring choices on who to be. By 30, I’d be over silly worries about the unknown because, my goodness, by then I’d have had 30 years of practice, and that was, like, a lot.

By 40, 50, and 60, well, I’d be in sweet clover, having automatically received the timely gifts of understanding the purpose of life, my own place in the scheme of it, and how to fix a dripping faucet.

To my surprise, it’s now clear there are no automatic age-related updates for my mental voice. If there were, it wouldn’t still sound and feel much the same this year – Sheila’s senior year – as it did during my own. The characteristics I want it to have are not going to show up, unbidden, like facial hair. My disappointment is immense.

God, with godlike ineffability, designed us so that our bodies mature automatically, but not our minds. “Wrinkles, I took care of. Confidence, discipline, and self-understanding? You’re on your own.”

People in their 80’s and 90’s have told me their inner selves sound and feel no older than they did decades earlier. Changes in thought and attitude came with experience, effort and choice. For many, the favorite characteristics of their inner selves – compassion, hope, enthusiasm – are those they decided they wanted and then worked to achieve.

Surely it’s a positive sign for those of us who believe deeply in the reality of the human soul, that the self doesn’t automatically mature like the body, on a pre-set schedule. If it did, how could we argue that the body is separate, and isn’t who we are? While automatic upgrades would be handy, they would destroy the concept and the worth of individuality. This would be true whether the upgrades were for physical skills, like bike riding, or mental skills, like patience.

Sheila told me this week that when she was small she’d watch me typing, amazed at the speedy movements of my fingers, and sentences appearing on the screen. She thought one day she’d just “know” how to type. She figured it would come to her, much like I had pictured my automatic upgrades coming to me.

Instead, she gained the skill in Hall School’s computer room, struggling to get her fingers to locate keys on a keyboard shielded from view by a frustrating blue box. She didn’t particularly enjoy learning to type. But, she loves what it has made possible for her. Plus, using repetition to acquire a skill gave her experience in the worth of practice.

Learning experiences tend to follow the formula of: TTBL + E = SGFL. Thing To Be Learned, plus Effort, equals Skill Gained For Life. It’s actually a pretty cool setup, because no matter how basic and physical the TTBL is, the E part guarantees at least some of the skill gained will be for the inner self. At least a third of what I know about frustration came from learning to thread a sewing machine needle for 4-H projects. Hammering a nail is one of the plainest TTBL’s there are, but it gave my inner voice a lot of experience with starting over, and plenty of handy vocabulary.

There are a variety of skills Sheila’s dad and I plan to help her acquire before she heads off to college next year. (She says she was paying attention to the lesson on determination that came with his river trip across Nebraska.) Changing a tire and making a decent white sauce are among those doable in a weekend.

Others, like handling conflict with grace, are long-term projects.

And so is our effort in adapting to her independence.