Caring

Caring.

Why does it matter? Does it? Just watch someone do work they don’t care about, and then answer this question. When students take writing courses, they begin with the entirely wrong approach. They don’t care about reading. They don’t care about writing. They don’t care about getting better at either one. They only care about finishing, and about their final grades. That kind of caring leads to a distorted kind of work—product is the only thing that matters, and QUALITY of experience and of craftsmanship is forgotten in the hurry to generate passable material.

The first mode of being for a child is caring. Each child emerges into the world eager to experience and learn. The structure of the mind makes it so. The young child exploring its surroundings cares by definition and by necessity about those surroundings. Parents, of course, should reinforce this mode of being with their own caring, which also provides a model of how to care well.

Somehow, however, caring gets misdirected. Everyone starts to care about grades, and about money, and about outcomes, and about products, more than about the actual work of making and living and relating to others. Caring becomes distorted, misshapen. How does it happen? Part of it is the teenage rebellion against the cares of the parents. Part of it is a culture that teaches children to care about the wrong things. Part of it is an educational system that insists on objectivity and routine more than on student passion and involvement in learning. But the result is devastating. We must learn to care about each moment, each effort, each person we interact with. They are all full of possibility, and life is richer when we recognize this simple fact.