My son, Clyde, recently took a month’s staycation. He wasn’t trying to save money, he wasn’t trying to get some big project done—no, he just sat in his room and, apparently, did nothing for a whole month. Which sounds incredibly relaxing, and very empowering, and was probably a great exercise in learning all of the super awesome benefits of self care. There was one small problem, however: he’s in seventh grade.
It took me a month to realize Clyde had gone on staycation because he still went to school everyday—it was only at home that he went off duty. Apparently, it was only when it came time to do homework that the Gone Fishin’ sign made an appearance in his head. This was a situation I was finally made aware of when I went to check his grades online and saw that there were so many zeros I thought I was looking at binary code. I immediately called Clyde into the kitchen to explain himself.
“So, uh, how’s everything going at school?” I asked.
“Great,” he replied.
Hmm, I bet I thought. What I said, though, was “What’s up with all the zeros?” Clyde gave me a shrug in reply, as if that answered everything. I thought about it for a second, and then said,“Ah,” in return, because, in fact, it kind of did: Clyde had simply stopped trying. And that was something that I could understand all too well.
Everyone has that moment. That moment where you ask yourself, “What if I just stopped trying? Would anyone notice? Is anyone even paying attention to what I do in the first place?” In Clyde’s case that moment manifested as a case of existential angst, expressed as “If a homework assignment fails to be turned in in the forest, and no one is there hear it, does the zero actually make any sound?”
It’s a valid philosophical question. One that many of us pose in our own heads over the years, with many different trees and many different forests. Sometimes the tree is work, sometimes it is a relationship, and sometimes it is something that we used to do for fun and is now a chore. But regardless of the species of tree, the question is always the same: does anything I do make any difference to anyone at all?
In Clyde’s case, the answer was “yes.” It made a difference to me. And, obviously, it made a difference to his grades. A big difference. Luckily for him he is still in seventh grade, which is well before the time when, in the immortal words of the Violent Femmes, “this will go down on your permanent records,” so he still has plenty of time to recover from this year’s existential crisis and come out the other side relatively unscathed.
Also, luckily for him, he has lots of seventh grade friends who are in the same boat (woods?), as well as having an older sister who went through the same thing four years ago, and so I know that this isn’t a reflection of his moral fortitude (or lack thereof), but rather just another one of those moments when you find yourself needing to see if gravity still works.
Gravity, in this case, being me, and my insistence that homework is almost always done. I say “almost” because there are some homework assignments I cannot even pretend to agree with, and I think “This gives my mom a headache” is a perfectly valid reason to skip out on those assignments.
Because if there is one thing I know for sure, it is that when a wordfind falls in the forest, nobody notices anything at all.