It must have something to do with age, but instead of waking up and getting out of bed refreshed, last Sunday morning, I was hurting. Nothing very complicated. It was just a knot in my back. I chalked it up to a tumble during a late-season hockey game or maybe carrying home too many bags of students’ papers to mark.
Anyway, soon after, I took my coffee up to my office and began editing and evaluating those papers. But it was hard to ignore the gorgeous day unfolding outside my office window. So, eventually, with all that blue sky and long-overdue warm air, I gave in.
“I’ll just rake the lawn for a while,” I thought to myself. “At the very least, it’ll clear my head.”
Being relatively organized – even when it comes to raking a lawn – I assembled the tools and refuse bags I would need for the enterprize. Then, for the first time in months, I actually walked around the backyard. Along with all the dead twigs, leaves and grass that I hadn’t bothered to clean up last fall, I noticed crocuses and spring bulbs popping up here and there. I stopped long enough to listen to some of the songbirds – cardinals, wrens and robins – now back in the neighbourhood. And among the smattering of evergreens in our yard, I could even smell the pine and spruce sap. I imagined a forest of maple trees back there and the potential for sugaring off some of their spring produce.
But wait a minute. I was just escaping the office to rake the lawn.
As a kid I remember how important time spent outdoors really was. Of course, it was no big deal. In fact, at the first sign of spring, our parents chased us outside. It was almost a reflex. Somehow, through a sense of self-preservation or practicality, they knew that sending us outside was therapeutic for all of us.
We burned off steam. They had time to themselves without kids climbing the walls around them. There were even times when our folks let us load sandwiches and pop in our backpacks, hop on our bikes and take off into the countryside.
In the days when the Rouge River valley or the fields around the Guild Inn seemed remote, us kids would take off and disappear into our imaginations at the east end of Scarborough until the sandwiches ran out or the sun set, whichever came first. And nobody – neither our parents nor us – seemed particularly concerned. As long as we made it back by suppertime.
Whatever happened to that notion? Have we become so frightened of everything and everything of us, that nobody can go anywhere, least of all out-of-sight, without panicking? Why can’t parents (and yes grandparents) find a way to get kids out of doors just to let them run, run around or even temporarily run away?
“Those are helicopter parents,” they tell me, “the ones who are overprotective of their children, who take an obsessive interest in their kids’ lives, to the point that they ‘hover’ over their kids all the time.”
Once when I was a host-producer at TV Ontario, we shot a short documentary about the predecessor to helicopter parents. We called the item, “Over-supervised children: How parents steal childhood from their kids.” We followed a number of kids and parents beyond their comfort zones, letting the kids play unsupervised and keeping the parents from interfering.
We got more response – both negative and positive – for suggesting that children occasionally need to escape, to fall down and scrape their knees when Mom and Dad aren’t there to protect them. The experts we interviewed said kids need time to explore and learn about their world on their own. They suggested that such freedom helped nurture independence, problem-solving skills and the even healthier personalities.
Anyway, back to last Sunday’s escape into my back forty. After several hours of avoiding my office work in favour of raking leaves, erecting a few bird houses and feeders and poking around unexplored corners of the yard, I came away feeling pretty good about getting outside. I’d cleaned up a couple of flowerbeds. I’d carted about a dozen bags of yard waste to the curb. I’d covered myself in plenty of dust and grime. But I could actually point to portions of the cleaned-up yard and say I’d accomplished something. That’s the other part of working out-of-doors; the results are generally visible.
Oh, but in this case there was one invisible benefit from the Sunday afternoon I played hooky from my marking and worked outside. All that raking and bagging and hauling in the backyard had somehow loosened body muscles that had been kind of idle all winter long. And, at least temporarily, that knot in my back was gone. I guess it was a case of getting outside to solve the problem inside.