I have decided to focus, in 2009, on naming virtues when I see them. Life is not fair. It is one of the great virtues of humanity that we try to create systems of fairness, even justice, in this world but the natural world is often unjust. One seed falls upon a barren rock and another in a fertile meadow. The lightening strikes the barn of a kind farmer while the barn of a tyrant down the road is spared. It is one of the great mysteries to me and many others no doubt, that life can be so unfair. Even worse, instead of being fair, human beings often behave unjustly toward one another. We console ourselves and each other with stories of righting wrongs, as best we can, and stories of overcoming adversity--no matter the source. Striving, often against the events or people in life that seem unjust, we develop
Virtues.
We name virtues because they are precious to us--because we have a sense that virtue is what matters most. We often start out giving a child a name that is a virtue, like Asha, meaning hope, or Sandy meaning, defender of others. In the end, we name the virtues that we have seen in a human being as a measure of his or her worth and accomplishment in life in a eulogy. Along the way, we sometimes forget to name the virtues that we see and talk more about what is wrong with one another. In my work, in fact, we are experts at naming deficits in children. I am not only charged with naming what is wrong with a child, I am supposed to quantify it--which magnifies the sense of reality and importance of that deficit. For example, I might write in a report that a child's receptive language skills are two standard deviations below the mean or that a child has a vocabulary that is similar to that of a two year old when she is seven. As a profession, based upon a system that we have imposed upon the natural diversity of all things in human beings,we set a largely arbitrary "Good Enough" point for children's language development and then discusss how far a particular child's language skills are from that point. Despite the fact that parents ask us to do this very thing, it is hard to overstate the pain it causes a parent to receive this evaluation. As for the child, it can be very painful for a child to be seen in this way as well. To be just to a child, we must see that child's virtues and clearly communicate this view to the child. I need a counter weight to the deficit view of children that is part of what I must do in my profession and the counter weight that I have found is
Naming Virtues.
Let me give you an example of
Naming Virtues: Very reasonably, Schuyler, is reluctant to go far from his mother or father. He is four years old and has learned to communicate his needs much much better in the last six months but his experience has been that things go better when he has a parent next to him. We have been helping him learn that he will be successful even on his own now that his language skills are so much improved. When we were playing last week, the batteries ran out on a little plastic drill that we were using as we reassembled a little plastic airplane.
Jan has batteries, I told Schuyler,
go ask her for new batteries. Schuyler looked immediately at his dad for support. Dad said,
I will wait here, Schuyler. Schuyler got up, looking back at his dad several times (which his dad ignored) and went by himself to ask Jan, our office manager, for new batteries and then came back with these installed.
You are becoming CONFIDENT, I told Schuyler. When you are CONFIDENT, this means that you feel sure of yourself. You were a little bit worried but you went. You went all by yourself to ask Jan for batteries because you were CONFIDENT that you could do this.
When I am able to name a virtue in a child, I am able to show that child his or her own gift. It is not difficult. Every child has virtue and every child is developing new virtues day by day. I am witness, in my work to demonstrations of
PATIENCE, GENTLENESS, COMPASSION, KINDNESS, DETERMINATION, CREATIVITY, HOPE, SINCERITY, FRIENDLINESS, COURAGE, JOYFULNESS...the list goes on and on.
Consciously naming virtues is an idea that I got from the folks at
Virtues Project. I often use a set of cards that I bought from this website and these cards name and describe virtues, helping me remember to see virtues in others and to use the language of virtues.
Just as they suggest, I name the virtue when I see it and tell the child or adult what behavior I saw that I felt exemplified this virtue.
The memory that this phrase elicited for me was of a visit to an East Indian Doctor in St. Paul, Minnesota with our youngest daughter (pictured here at eleven years old). We had adopted our tiny, severely undernourished daughter, Malika, when she was two. She had spent the first part of her life in an orphanage and developmentally, we knew that she was behind American norms on many things but the thing that worried us most at the beginning was her weight. She doubled in weight within months after she was on a good diet but she was below the 1st percentile on the growth charts. At four years old, I took her to an East Indian doctor who practiced medicine for half a year in the United States so that he could afford to provide medical care to people in rural India the other half. I thought maybe he could tell me if Malika was below the 1st percentile in weight in India or only in comparison to American children. The Doctor met Malika in a very warm and loving way and asked me lots of questions while gently listening to her heart beat and breathing and so on. Before he could answer my questions, however, we were interrupted by his nurse who handed him a note. He went to another room to return a call and he listened for a while with reassuring noises now and then that I could hear. He then said Get a pen and paper and I will prescribe for a you a prayer. And he did. Very slowly, so that his listener could write it down, he recited a lovely little prayer and then told the patient to recite this morning and night and at any time that he or she felt afraid. It was then that I understood I was not with a doctor like any one that I had ever met.
I believe that this doctor exemplified and inspired Extraordinary Optimism in his unconventional practice. He was truthful as ethically all professionals are expected to be, but not narrow in the truth that he told. I know that Malika was more able to find joy in her life because I was able to see her life as joyful and that meant accepting but not dwelling on the negative results of a difficult early beginning. There are many traditions that have evolved in the practice of parenting, medicine and education that do not serve the Extraordinary Optimism needed for this kind of work. Malika continues to be blessed with miracles, as you can see in her face looking up at the young man she has come to love. I am blessed to be able to participate in both the struggle and the joy of her life.
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