Author name: Lauren Edmunds

I am sitting on the floor in the shade outside. I am not doing just one thing, there is no one-thing-at-a-time.

I am neither a harassed mom nor an overworked executive. And I am not multi-tasking. It is how my brain works best. I need movement in order to think. One of my best friends needs to be still in order to think.

It is 6am in the mornings and I have my phone next to me on pause while I type this, I have been listening to an audio book about potential and children. My hands are stained with blackberry juice from my morning harvesting. The ripe berries rarely make it into the kitchen, but are eaten at source.

Under my fingernails is dirt from weeding and planting sage seeds (maybe too early for winter stews) and radishes. I plant radishes in stages because no one can eat too many radishes at one time. And just like the blackberries, I am not growing for much more than the here and now.

I am thinking about how the voices from my past still tell me I should be working at my desk with my feet planted on the floor. No wonder we battle to know our truth.

My tea is next to me, I made a new cup while taking a quick call from my cousin. My phone is a little more charged because the call took longer than the tea took to make, so I walked to my bedroom to add some juice to the battery. Checked my social media accounts to get another 10 percent.

And now I am sitting here, my back against the house, in the morning shade, typing this.

For far too long I have been not listening to what works for me. Blind to my actions. Deaf to my story. Going about life with the future and the past clearly in my mind and tripping over my reality as it gets in my way. My future is often filled with pictures that have no bearing on where I am now, and my past is jammed up with narratives and stories telling me who I should be and what I should think of myself.

This morning, however, I got to practice being in my present moment. Turning to look at all of the paraphenalia I had brought out to do weeding (phone, laptop, notebook, earpods, tea and some seeds – I realise that this is me. I am someone who does this, not because I have trauma (though I do, like everyone else) but because my brain can’t keep itself together if it tries to do a single task that isn’t highly purposeful. I am typing this so that I can see it in black and white and perhaps remember it more often.

I think more clearly when I am physically busy. Busy, is good for me. I need to distance myself from the language of my youth where sitting still was the goal rather than thinking. When one person’s view of intelligence was the gold standard. And the rest of us just had to try harder.

I just planted more gooseberry seeds. Scattered them in a big area that’s been cleared. Everyone says “once you have gooseberries you always have them” as if that’s a bad thing. Did you know that what we think of as weeds aren’t actually weeds. We think weeds are everything that we don’t want in our garden. Nope. Weeds are actually the hardy plants that find their way into the tiny cracks of hardened and infertile soul, they grow in dry and hot ground, cracking the soil and allowing light and rain in. Weeds create new life in places that have been barren for years. And, like the Black-Jacks growing in the trodden paths of my hiking spots, they hold the soil in place, preventing erosion, Imagine that.

It is about time we all saw our personal ‘flaws’ not as unwanted by the norm and history of our lives, but as powerful and purposeful and intentional. Who we are isn’t a flowerbed of weeds with the occassional intentional pumpkin creeper you placed deliberately in the soil and miraculously is growing. The weeds are us. Don’t pull out the weeds and hope that ‘real flowers’ grow. Those weeds, they are the real flowers. You’re pulling out who you are, the parts of you that grow unattended in the context you life in.

I hope that you, like me, start to see who you really are, the many facets of you, and that you let the weeds grow alongside the intended pumpkin plant.

I cannot get used to saying this, and I hope I never do. Not because I am in denial about how my brain works, nor am I denying the existence of the condition. I am saying that it isn’t a disorder, it is a type of brain.

The historical understanding of this is vastly inaccurate and damaging. For as long as I have been in education I have battled to believe in this condition, and now I know why. What the medical world was saying didn’t make any sense.

I think quickly and make diverse connections. I thrive in conversations where interrupting each other builds the ideas. When I find what I want to focus on I am easily able to get the energy and clarity to drive the idea fast and far. I have my own order and it doesn’t look like yours. I manage my diary in my way and just because I might miss something isn’t cause for anyone to tell me I am doing something wrong. I am creative and can solve problems easily. I am brave and innovative.

I do not have a disordered brain. At least not in the way the label of ADHD describes it.

I am not going to lie, I kind of like this word for me. It fits well, like trying on the perfect denims. If someone hurled this at me as an insult, I would catch it and gobble it up.

“Thank you!” I would beam back at them.

The word disruptor is new in the business stratosphere. I never thought of me this way before, but as the word started making its rounds I noticed how I would subconsciously be nodding my head. I even own a book with this as the title. That book I read most of.

I have a book habit, you see. which is far more healthy than something like smoking but it can get out of control. I was asked a few years back if I had read every book. Back then, I was not as clear about who I was and my answer was defensive. But the question got me standing in front of each of my many bookshelves one by one that evening, and counting how many I had read and not.

It was that night that I figured out what reading meant to me. That same friend had recently shared a part of her journey where she had made the connection for herself about exercise. Her mind had linked running to exercise and whenever she was encouraged or even berated into doing some exercise her nervous system had a melt down. She hated running. After some personal journey work, she got to the root of it. Once disentangled she could easily say yes to evening walks with the dog or even swimming lengths at the local pool. Exercise was now free to be whatever she wanted it to be.

Reading for me didn’t have to mean cover to cover with the ability to answer questions about the text afterwards. That was what we did in school, and my mom, being a primary school teacher, encouraged that at home as well. In fact, she encouraged us to always finish everything, from the food on our plates to the jersey I showed interest in knitting at one time.

A short diversion on this hand knitted jersey. My mom was a traditional home-maker and encouraged those skills in me too. It was cobalt blue wool and I was knitting it from scratch. I ploughed through the first side and made it to the armholes. Mom was a perfectionist and so this entire section had had some parts redone at least three times as holes were found from dropped stitches. Two years later she hauled this front panel, akin to a chest plate of armour from medieval Europe, out of the basket hidden behind the chair and asked it I would be finishing it anytime soon. I have no idea what allowed it to be stowed away for so long, because nothing was ever unfinished in our home. I reached for it from my mother’s hands and held it up against my now two years older body. It was now neither going to be wide enough or long enough to fit. I think in the moment she saw my utter defeat and realised that it wasn’t necessary to parent me into finishing this particular task. There was no way I was going to undo the entire thing and start again.

I tell you these stories because standing in front of my many books I realised that reading to me means something different to what I had been taught. I love books, ever since I watched the Franklin Players performing 84 Charing Cross Road at our local community centre, I cannot resist a bookstore, ever. I adore the feel and smell of books. I marvel at the pages and fonts and chapters. I revel in their possibilities, in their wisdom, even their beauty.

Some books I own because the title, sitting upright on the shelf, reminds me of something. I great example of that is Tim Ferriss’ book Tribe of Mentors. I actually found that I can’t get through more than a few pages, the content isn’t right for me (at least not now) but the broad yellow and black spine anchors the top shelf right in the middle and reminds me to lean into my mentors. My books are like my framed art pieces, the shelves the borders that contain them.

And so, my brand of disruption comes from knowing better what I am about and leaning into that with courage and peace. It is knowing what is right in spite of what is. It is knowing that I don’t need permission to follow what I need and want.

I am not cantankerous. (Isn’t that a great word: it means bad-tempered, argumentative and uncooperative.) I am not a preventer. I have no need to halt others in the process. But what I am is someone who sees things the way she sees them and does some thing with that knowledge and knowing.

The question I have now for myself, am I prepared to take my way of educating children and really put it out there? What if I do, but no one is listening. Or maybe worse, what if I do and someone steels it, steels who I am. Or even worse, what is the anti-disruptors, the large systems that need everything to stay as it is, take me out. How strong can I be in the face of the status quo and big money.

We’ll see.

Sometimes we have to walk a little way down the road we think we want to choose to really know if it is the road we want to take.

Earlier this year I tried out for the Mountain Search and Rescue team. At the wonderful age of two score and nine (that has a pretty good ring to it) I had not felt stronger in quite some time.

The weekend was to involve a 5km hike with a 27kg+ backpack up an elevation of 300m. Then a 30kg water carry for 100m. Wild camping with no tent and no cooking equipment. We were to do a navigation exercise using co-ordinates and a phone app, abseil and then swim in the freezing cold mountain water with our clothes on. Apparently a lot of people say they can swim but can’t, and so it goes.

None of this was going to be a problem because it is the kind of thing my friends and I do for fun.

I started my climbing journey at the end of 2020, I was 46 years old. My first ever mountain climbing experience was Isolation Pinnacle at Groot Kloof (if you know anything about outdoor climbing, you’ll understand). It was January this same year that I had started climbing and hiking much more seriously and was almost never home on weekends and school holidays. My friends had started teaching me a lot more skills and I was really ready to learn. We were setting up trad abseils, I was leading trad climbs and we were hiking much further which more weight in our packs.

Up until this year, I had been more of a passenger. They walked and I followed. They climbed and I followed. But I was getting stronger mentally with all of the personal work I was doing and paying attention was getting easier. An epic over the Christmas holidays where we were rained off Red Column, a multi-pitch trad climb, kind of solidified my enjoyment of bot the risk and the mitigation of the risk of climbing and the mountains.

I got the call a fortnight after the assessment weekend to say that I had made it through to the next round. I passed all of the tests and overcame all of the hurdles (for the record, this had nothing on Veldskool from back in the day) except one. They felt that they had not had a chance to see my personality yet.

That really floored me and I took a lot of time to figure this out. I hadn’t come face-to-face with the need for group acceptance like this in some years. And they were all half my age. Why had they not seen who I was?

On the assessment weekend, my original gung-ho attitude had been thwarted by my climbing partner getting a tummy bug the day before, so I went with another friend who was getting over the flu. He is a very strong hiker and climber but this weekend he was taking strain.

As we started the first challenge that was the hike, the rain set in and we trudged uphill, all of us trailing behind the next in a line of sorts. We hadn’t been given end coordinates but were assured that there was a sweeper. When the rains reduced visibility I lost sight of the hiker in front of me. My friend was falling behind, weighed down my a steel stretcher that had been added to his load.

If the hiker in front wasn’t going to wait for me, at least I was going to wait for the guy behind me. When he caught up, he was coughing terribly. We found shelter from the wind and took the heavy packs off for some respite. Pulling out some food and sipping water, we waited for the sweeper. After 15 minutes I decided that waiting was getting dangerous because it was getting dark, we were wet and cold and the sweeper didn’t look like they were coming. I send a pin location to the leader and waited another 5 minutes as we repacked our bags, covered them against the rain and hauled them back onto our backs.

The plan was to make our way to the closest camp site that we knew about. As we walked up and over the rocks that had been a bit of a shelter, we saw the leader. He had seen the pinned location and had headed back. Without much fuss, we smiled and greeted them and followed them the rest of the way.

That night, around the Christmas lights that someone had brought in lieu of the fire we are banned from making in the wilds of the Magaliesberg, they apologised for the mistakes they made. I nodded and smiled, their apology was good to hear. They were not arrogant enough to try to cover it up.

For the rest of the weekend I learnt the skills, did what was asked and never complained. I watched them, observing their teamwork and their relationships. They are a good team. They know each other well and make space for each other. I would be very happy if they had to come and rescue me. But did I want to be a part of it?

When they invited me to join tentatively I was faced with some interesting introspection. What did they not see? I was right back in my school uniform again being called the ice-princess and not knowing why that was. Only I wasn’t sixteen anymore and I wasn’t trying to fit in. Maya Angelou calls it belonging to yourself.

I really appreciated that weekend and those rescuers. Without them I may not have figured some things out. I came face-to-face with my stoicism and my nobility. I saw how my humility gets in my way and that I still prefer to look before I leap. I value crossing the finish line with my team rather than racing ahead to win. But I also value excelling and improvement. When I trust you, I am willing to show you the other side of myself, but until then you get the serious me that waits for the guy at the back who is struggling, is level headed under pressure and can manage almost any challenge.

The dreams of saving someone off a mountain was not mine but my amazing climbing partner’s, who has since gone on to ice climb and assist with safety training and extend his guiding certifications and so much more.

I haven’t climbed or hiked since March. I am okay with that for now. It hasn’t left me, not completely. I miss my friends and the experiences and look at mountain sides a little longer than everyone else. My gear remains ready for the next time.

I started down a road that wasn’t for me then turned around and walked back. I don’t feel like I let anyone down and I don’t feel like I abandoned myself. I think I found a bit of myself instead. And it left me feeling content.

It is early in the morning as I type this and I am sitting outside with two books in my hand: an old copy of The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck and a new copy of Stephen Cope’s book, The Great Work of Your Life.

Their connection to one another lies, at face value, in the shared exploration of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken.

As I delved into Stephen Cope’s book inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, a revered Hindu scripture, I reached his chapter on Robert Frost’s life.

Cope proceeds to expand on the renowned poem, it offers up the idea of these crossroads we encounter throughout our lives. He speaks of how we often unfold an old camping chair and place it right in the intersection of our choices, taking the time to ponder over which path to take. Tragically, Cope tells us that many of us fail to make any decision, and spend the rest of our lives in that temporary seat. This reminds me of Devon Brough’s prose that repeats the line ‘Choose your hard’.

It is this that I am thinking about as I read a chapter smack bang in the middle of the old book I’ve just acquired. The middle is an odd place to start, but here we are. The chapter has the title, ‘The Work of Attention.’

The word attention is a BIG word in my field. It is usually accompanied by talk of ADHD, learning difficulties and medication. So it catches my eye.

Usually, these journeys of thought I go on are akin to the strange twists and turns taken by Alice in Wonderland. And they often begin with a solitary sentence on a page that reaches out to me and grabs my focus. The sentence is simply: “The principal form that love takes is attention.”

Of course!

This line runs through my mind in a loop trying to find its connections. I read on.

Peck goes on to speak of the work that love takes, that it is neither passive, nor lazy nor scared – but rather that love takes action, that it is hard work, and that it takes courage. And here it sits, the idea that love is attention. More specifically, that love is listening with attention.

Is listening something we seem to find easy or hard to do?

Post the lockdown of the world, the fallout in families that I am seeing is that we have stretched the elastic band of connection a bit much and we’ve not bounced all the way back. I see far more screen time being allowed with far less supervision. I am seeing parents working longer hours as the lines blur. Stress keeps everyone insular and cut off from one another. Parents are trying to find their feet, trying to decompress and recover, making space for themselves and their own relationships. Screens are ready to lap up our time and suck us further and further away from each other.

If the principal form of love is shown through listening with attention, this new way of being could be very bad news for us all. Anat Baniel talks about movement with attention, in fact it is the first of her nine essentials. Without attention there is no learning. And now we see that without attention, love gets lost.

My thinking is thrown around by this. I am cast back to the book Hold Onto Your Kids, a parenting book written by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. They talk of children finding their primary attachment no longer with their parents but with their peers and more worrying, with their screens.

They speak about making sure that you collect your children up at the end of the school day and connect with them so that they find their home in your arms and in your words and … now that I read this … in your listening and attention.

The next step is doing the type of listening that strengthens your love and connection. Maté has spoken of this need for attachment (connection) and that children require this and authenticity. The sad story is that if they do not get secure attachment they are prepared to forgo their authentic selves to connect. This makes the argument for listening even stronger.

Peck describes five levels of listening, devoting considerable focus and energy to the final level – the most important and requiring the most effort.

Here they are in ascending order of effort.

1) The first level is to find a child’s chatter annoying and counterproductive and to forbid it. To create a ‘no speaking’ zone in our homes or in the classroom and shut it down.
2) The second level is to allow all of the chatter of a child, but to listen to none of it, to ignore it as if it is meaningless.
3) The third is to pretend to listen. This is to carry on with your own task, whether you’re busy with a chore, work, or scrolling on your phone and let out a series of ‘unh huh’ or ‘that’s nice’ noises in response to the monologue.
4) The fourth level is listening selectively, listening out for keywords that you feel could be important and filter out the chaff for the wheat, only a lot of wheat gets lost.
5) Then there is the fifth way, ‘it is to truly listen to the child, giving him or her your full and complete attention, weighing each word and understanding each sentence.’

The fifth way is the greatest effort and is the highest form of love. Listening takes work. Love takes work.

Along with Neufeld’s request that we reconnect attentively with our children when we pick them up after the school day, and Peck’s suggestion that we truly listen to our children, there are two other pieces of really practical advice.

Peck adds a practice he calls bracketing. “An essential part of true listening is bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes.” This seems to be the idea of empathy.

And Brené Brown gives us this last piece. It is not enough to listen well to another’s story, we also have to believe the other person.

And so, in the pursuit of loving our children, I hope that you take this road worth taking, even if it is hard, because the effort is almost always worth it when it comes to loving our families.

It’s a book published in 2021, written by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., and John J. Ratey, M.D.

My journey with ADHD continues, with even greater curiosity.

Two things struck me from the book. The one was VAST, which the authors are saying is a modern day version of ADHD brought on by our modern environments. It’s not in the DSM, it’s not a diagnosis. This appeals to me. The DSM is limiting for a non-medical professional like myself. It is too clinical. (Of course it is, it’s meant to be.)

In the book, they layout a table they call a self-portrait which juxtaposes the light and the shadow side of traits common to people with VAST, and very similar to people with ADHD.

I quite like this table because it is not dissimilar to a task I did for myself about a year ago where I spent time considering who my core self was and then working out when those traits were helpful and when they were not. That makes sense to me. For example, one of my core traits is nobility, in the light it is a powerful strength of character, but in the shade it is more like martyrdom. When you can own your true self and your behaviours then you can get better at either managing them, enjoying them or fixing them. My adage in my work has been to first develop awareness, then compassion and then a plan of action.

The other piece that I enjoyed was all of the help they offered. I am an action seeker, I want the research as well as the potential solution. Without an action plan it is just a bunch of academics moaning. No, that is a bit harsh. But a little bit true.

This is why I like the work of Anat Baniel, Prof. Reuven Feuerstein, John Ratey, Carol Dweck, Maryann Wolf, Jo Boalar, Brene Brown – in fact, listening to a podcast with Brene Brown just yesterday, she spoke about how her work would have been placed in the academic folds and read by maybe 10 people if she had done what all other researchers do. But she didn’t bolster up her work with jargon that just builds walls around research, she deliberately spoke in a way that is accessible and she actually made it all accessible. And we are immensely grateful to her and all of the others for sharing. And caring.

The crazy thing is, that if I had read this book a year ago I would only be thinking of my students and how I could use this to help them more. This week, I am also thinking about me. The more I lean into this for myself, the more I see what I have not been wiling to see before.

I take my Ritalin with mixed emotions every morning. I identify strongly as a person who doesn’t take any meds, so it hurts to swig down the 10mg. Yet, I notice a big difference in my state every time. I do know though, that for all of these years I have done pretty well, and most very well. This raises the question of coping vs masking. It also makes me think that the therapy work must be done as well. But that is for another time.

The tug-o-war continues.