Childhood

You know, most most people, I think, have never thought about what childhood is, and if you don't have children yourself and you're an adult, you don't have to. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it just doesn't matter to you. But if you're a parent, you need to think about why it is that we have literally the longest childhood relative to lifespan of any organism on the planet. This is a feature. This is a way for us to learn how to become human. Everyone who has ever been in school, even if, like me, you happen to have been a good fit for the model of schools that you were in, which I think is pretty rare, actually knows that you also need to have time to get out there and play and move your body and experience it and not have it being overseen by some adult who's decided in advance what isn't is not safe for you to experience. So you're one of the things I used to say to my students in advance. I did a lot of team building, like actual team building and planning with them in advance of these long study abroad trips. We would have spent weeks together on campus in advance of going on these trips. But what I wanted to do before we left was establish with them, what's your relationship with risk? How do you how do you view your relationship with risk? And we would do this in round. Like, I would answer the question, too. And, you know, I would say to them, actually, I happen to love risk. I will I am the leader on this trip, but I will keep all of you safe. But then I'm going to go do things like I am going to walk alone in the forest a lot and do things because it happens to be one of the ways that I find my consciousness that I that I find my truest self. And I don't expect any of you to do that also. But you need to be comfortable with the fact that your leader is going to be doing that sort of thing and.