Dumbo’s Feather

I think I can safely spoiler the movie Dumbo here. In the movie the tiny but spunky baby elephant is bullied for his big ears, but with the help of a ‘magic’ feather, discovers he can use them to fly. Only… when he loses the magic feather, he starts to fall without it. It takes a little convincing, but finally he realizes he could fly all along, the feather was just a crutch to get him started.

So I was thinking about this at work the other day. I have this thing I do where I have to put a small aliquot of reagent in with sample, and we’ve decided it works best if that is done every 20 seconds. I’m sitting there, staring at the timer countdown, squirting reagent, shifting to the next sample, staring at the clock… I was a bit bored, and my mind wandered. Did we really need to do this? I wondered, or is it like Dumbo’s magic feather? The assay is a bit twitchy, definitely both time and light-sensitive, so we baby it. In chemistry, what looks like superstition might actually be what’s required for the reaction.

In real life? The human mind is a tricky and wonderful thing. Take my Dad, for instance (don’t really take him, I’m fond of the big guy). When he was a teenager, he had a nasty case of food poisoning after a picnic, and he’s flatly refused to eat mayonnaise in any form ever since. Now, it might not have been the mayo (it was probably the mayo. Bacterial heaven, that stuff, and no-one handles it with enough care at picnics). But if I tried to feed it to him now, he’d likely get sick from sheer suggestion. His mind connects mayo with poison, and that’s that. It would be mean, and unnecessary, to attempt to convince him otherwise.

Sometimes, though, just like in the story of Dumbo, we have to kick away the crutches and convince the plucky underdog they can stand on their own two feet. Belief in one’s ability to fail is easy. Belief in one’s ability to succeed… Has to be taught.

Look, any experienced mother will tell you that sometimes you have to put that baby down, and let it cry a little, or it will never learn to walk. I used to tell my girls to put their brother down, or they’d still be carrying him when he was eighteen. Given that he’s likely to be bigger than any of them…! Well, perhaps that age is a bit of exaggeration. But not by much. I taught mine not to be afraid of (most) bugs by not showing fear myself. I taught them to walk by not carrying them constantly, and eventually they wanted to go places badly enough that even without mother’s arms, they locomoted and fell, tried again, and succeeded. It’s all part of human development and growth.

How about adults, though? What’s your magic feather? I don’t mean rank superstition. I mean the ridiculous thing you do because if you don’t, you’re not going to get that raise, or make that meeting work, meet the right girl, buy a house, or… Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with a feather as long as it doesn’t show. I have an internal process I use when I have to get up and perform in front of an audience. I’m nervous and jumpy beforehand, but once the time comes, I settle and calmly start doing my thing. I know I’m going to have jitters, but I don’t let them get the best of me. Sometimes, you do things because you have no other choice. It can break you, or you can gird up your loins and wade into battle knowing that you may die, but it won’t be in vain. On the other side, you realize something: you did that. Not some lucky charm, some other person working you like a puppet, some magic ineffable eff. You. You did it all on your own, through the strength inherent to your own self. Now, I’m a woman of Faith. I believe that we were designed to be strong. Not that He uses us like freaking finger puppets. But we can do far more than we credit ourselves with, using the gifts we were given.

Which doesn’t mean that I think I can do it all by myself. Harking back to young motherhood, with stubborn toddlers who wanted to ‘do it myself!’ I know that sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you do need help. But it’s better to take a step back and let them try it for themselves and learn, through that try-fail process. If you hover, you cripple them and become their crutches. If you’re there when they truly cannot and come to seek help in tears, you are able to teach them that sometimes questions are important. A certain Little Man is still working on that part. When he gets an idea in his head, he wants to do it, right this moment. It doesn’t matter that he needs instruction and guidance. He knows how (or thinks he does), and he’s going to do it all by himself. You can’t argue him out of it, and he’s too energetic for me to get out ahead of him and prevent him from careering off into his own disasters. So I have stopped trying. Eventually he’ll come to me and ask ‘why didn’t this work?’ and I can tell him ‘Buddy, it’s broken. We can’t fix it. But next time, if you stopped when it started to go wrong, and ask…” there’s no such thing as too many questions.

Coming back to my assay at work, I used to worry I was making a pest out of myself asking too many questions. Even when I was trained on a procedure, I’d still run up against things that I didn’t remember, or hadn’t seen, and I’d ask questions. But as time has passed and I’ve seen other newbies come in that don’t ask enough questions… ask. Ask a lot of questions. I’d rather give three answers than have to clean up one big mess caused by ignorance and an unwillingness to appear foolish.

If it take a magic feather to build confidence? I’m all for it. But eventually you have to be willing to let go, build up your own knowledge, self-analyze, and fly all on your own.

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