The Water Isn't Wet

Children as a combination of both catalysts and consequences.

My father passed away ten years and ten days after I was born. The memories and stories I’ve been lucky enough to retain over the years have provided me with a permanent catalogue of references to what it was like to once be a man’s son, and they loom largely in my mind. Supplementing these nebulous notions of nostalgia are two VHS tapes, on which footage of the two of us playing in a lake was captured. We swim and laugh, bumbling through the bending currents of purity and progeny. As we emerge onto a beach, and I scamper towards a towel and a can of 7Up, my dad asks me a question – “Was the water wet, Jesse?” I glance at the camera, and then at my dad, as the hint of an answer creeps into my already grinning cheeks. But I don’t reply. I laugh a little bit, and remain youthfully impervious to the poignancy of the moment.

“Is the water wet, Jesse?” became a mantra of mine after my dad died, as that tape and the emblematic moments it entails provided me with uniquely tangible documentation of what it was like to have had a father. This man, he was a total person, not just Dad. He had memories of his own, and plans as well. He had fears and love, hopes and concerns, a mind, a body and a voice. As I grew older, the only sentence I could hear that voice saying was “Is the water wet, Jesse?” It echoes in my head now as curiously and clearly as it did that day on the beach.

No, I don’t think that the water was wet. It’s understandable to imagine that water is in fact the wettest of all objects, and yet of course it is not water that’s wet, but only items that come into contact with water that can indeed be accurately blanketed with this term. I occasionally consider that I’m not exactly certain I know what water is, because if I think about it long enough, everything seems to be water. The identity of water is, for lack of a better term, fluid (sorry). I view all of the Earth, with all of its beings, both alive and inanimate, as being drops of water, and the universe itself as an ocean. And none of us is wet. Not even the fishies.

We are the world that surrounds us, and the world that surrounds us is us. We as humans have been afforded consciousness, but along with that comes an appreciation for our personal and cumulative impermanence. Consequently, we categorize and compartmentalize all forms of data and knowledge as a means of survival. Me/you, helpful/harmful, alive/dead. These groupings feel real, just as real as anything else, and we live our lives according to these collectively agreed upon distinctions. But just as there is no forest without trees, there is no we without I. An environment exists not apart from its inhabitants, nor as a result of its inhabitants, but instead both are a dual reflection of one another, simultaneously.

For a particular child to be born in a particular place and time to a particular set of parents, literally everything that has ever happened had to occur exactly as it did, otherwise the result would have been different. Once that child is born, the universe’s diary entries don’t cease to be written, but instead carry on with a new topic to cover, hence necessitating more ink, an augmented paper requirement and perhaps a bit less consideration for the previously dwelling beings so as to make room for the newest arrival. Everything that has ever been affects everything that ever will be, which then affects the results of everything that ever there was.

But what about ‘me’? And ‘you’? And ‘everyone else’!? These individuals and their lives are meaningful, and deserve to be treated with singular attention and consideration! Yeah, I guess. At the very least, we should all be led to feel valuable. Someone bought us a ticket for this ride, so we deserve to delight in the charade that presents each one of us as exceptional, anomalous and rare, at least sometimes, right? Rousseau claimed that a child is born pure, and that the best source of knowledge is nature. I would retort that a child is nature, and therefore everything is pure. The notion of impurity is a fabrication, as is the view of items that are man-made as unnatural. Everything and everyone came from somewhere, and that somewhere is called nature, thus designating everything that exists as natural.

The civilization that envelopes the newly arrived infant has been in the makings for thousands of human years, millions of organic matter years, and billions of everything else years, all in preparation for that moment. To presume that a child comes to exist within a realm that is static and separate from him/her is to say that when I pour water into the ocean, the ocean is now wet. Which, of course, it is not.

The notion of definitive stages within a human’s life is a cute concept, and provides us with a temporal backdrop with which we can discuss humanity’s quirks and foibles with pleasantly academic assuredness. However, a human is rarely “one thing” at any given moment, nor are we often a collection of “things” for an extended period of time. During every moment of our lives, we exist as a vast assortment of elements, chemicals, reactions and misunderstandings, flowing seamlessly from one amorphous entity (known as a ‘time’) into another. Perhaps objective characteristics such as age and size can be quantified, but adorning these figures with meaning is antiquated poetry. Change occurs at all times, both within us and around us. Measuring something as transient and illusory as a personality, and then endowing these measurements with meaning in accordance with a predetermined paradigm, and drawing conclusions from this meaning that others affirm as accurate is nearly an act of mass hallucination.  

Who we are, and how we are perceived, both by ourselves and others, is an interminably subjective guessing game for which there is no answer key. Some claim that biological determinism provides us with a bit of insight into our objective selves, because if anything has ever been “right”, it’s science. However, we must draw distinctions between what is empirically accurate according to trends and archetypes, and what is true. In science, there are occasionally exceptions to a rule. But in life, exceptions are the rule, and boundaries exist only in regards to what is, not to what can be.

The universal constructivist framework posed by Piaget addresses the individualistic complexities of each learner, and recognizes that there is a synthesis between the receptive mind and the world around it that must be considered. Learning is an active, symbiotic process, and the instructor of any lesson is as entrenched in the dynamic as the recipient of said lesson. Teaching is not batting practice, with an overweight assistant coach tossing a ball to an expecting batter who will then try to hit it as hard and far as possible. Education, ideally, is a delicate dance whose leader is indiscernible. An abstract painting that depicts tenor and topic simultaneously. A rainfall whose parachuting pearls of piddle merge with the awaiting earth in a collision of purpose and design.

My little sister Jenny and I were two of these raindrops, and we wobbled out from the womb genetically aligned, but destined for dissimilarity. We were born to the same parents, raised in the same household, attended the same schools and had overlapping interests. Our values, diets and worldviews stemmed from the same sources. Our trajectories were parallel, our goals analogous, and opportunities nearly identical. And yet, we are now, and essentially always have been, inconceivably different.

Jenny’s mom and my mom are the same person, but that does not in any way ensure that our respective relationships to that person are the same, or even similar. My being the first-born changes the dynamic between parent and child immeasurably, as does the fact that I inherited very few of my mother’s noticeable characteristics. I have grown to understand that I am, both physically and temperamentally, quite similar to our father, which markedly impacts the way my mother views and interacts with me.

I know quite well how it feels to be an only child, a big brother, and consequently a default caretaker. My sister does not. I possess zero understanding of what it’s like to have an older sibling, or what it’s like to be a younger sibling. Jenny’s personality in many ways was molded by having a big brother around, and yet I would not have been as “big brotherish” without her existence. My sister can hardly remember our dad. I don’t know what it’s like to be raised by a parent of the same gender as myself. As a nine-year-old, I was being lobbed philosophical queries whilst traipsing about a lake with my young, healthy father. By age nine, Jenny had spent half of her life without a father, raised by the combination of a single mother and an older brother. Every difference that exists between the two of us has further helped to construct who we are as individuals, and this shaping and reshaping is an eternal adventure, inevitably impacting our identities every step of the way.  

The adventure begins with one’s self, and our understanding of this sense of self is largely a reflection of what we endure. And yet, the surrounding atmosphere and existence that we personally perceive as reality is equally a reflection of who we individually are. Every day that a human experiences starts with conflict in the form of needs and questions – What will I eat? How will I ensure my physical safety, both today and in the future? Who will provide me with acceptance, comfort and love? Am I OK? What will make me happy? These moments of quandary can be viewed as examples of schemes discussed by Piaget, yet it seems that he underestimates exactly how much of life is in fact a conflict. For all of life is a conflict, and acceptance is the only remedy for our universal suffering.

Thought is symbolic, and emotions are but a vague representation of our inexact response to what we consider to be irrefutable reality. Piaget’s disregard for the connection between emotion and understanding is not surprising, for his view that maturation and exploration together form cognition seems to ignore the fact that the world itself matures as it is explored by each new mind. Our feelings can inform our thoughts, and vice versa, and the stimuli that inspire our feelings and thoughts are just as much a catalyst for these internal processes as they are a consequence of them. We are a combination of these catalysts and consequences.

The water is not wet, simply because water is not capable of being wet. The temperament of a child is not a result of his/her environment, simply because children are not capable of being results. A human life is an ongoing game of Double Dutch, and educators are fortunate enough to be able to jump in and play along, subtly guiding the progress of these new humans. Is the educator the one swinging the ropes as the child jumps? Or is the child the ropes, and it is the educator who attempts to maneuver through the winding cables, so as to contribute to the development of the game without disrupting the child’s motion? I feel that the ropes are the illusions of time, swinging and bending around us, as adults and children hop and hurdle through its labyrinth together.

As infants, we are both potentialities and finished products. We are complete humans, and yet our journeys through this particular life are pleasantly plain in their primordial position. I have a general understanding of who I allegedly was during every stage of my life – I have heard many stories, seen various photos and videos, and perused countless examples of creations of mine. As evidenced by these relics, it is quite clear to me that I have generally been who I am since day one, despite the array of surprises my surrounding environment has riddled me with over the years. Or, maybe I have remained myself because of these surprises, and perhaps it was in fact my very existence that contributed to these surprises occurring at all. What is life if not a series of surprises, tied together by the one predictable feature we can all rely on: ourselves? We will forever be who we are – the narrator, protagonist and reader of our story. The object and the subject. The song and the singer. The water and the wetness.