OVER EXPLAINED - WAY OVER EXPLAINED

I am guilty of over explaining things to my children. Where a simple answer can be given to a simple question I fail on an epic scale. Our youngest once asked me, ‘What is real?’ How easy it should have been to adopt my wife’s superior ability to look at the age of the child assess the depth of answer required and simply reply, ‘the stuff around you darling the things you can touch see, hear and smell are all real.’  Any 6 year old child would have been placated by this informative yet succinct explanation.

All books used to descibe what a fish was.

But 10 minutes prior to my wife explaining the basics of reality in terms that could be comprehended by one so young – I had embarked on a road of such explanatory excess that in comparative terms both the Old Testament and New Testament would have shared brevity with a haiku. This is how it went:

Blondie: What is real?Me: That is a good question. Do you mean what is real as in what is alive? Or what exists? Or what is real to you? Or real as in true?B: Just what is real?M: There are lots of different ways we can look at this. If you think real as true, then real is me saying that you have blonde hair.B: I know I have blonde hair.M: or what is real to you – this could mean that you are taught something that will help you at school at the moment like the Prime Minister is a good person who is in charge of the country which is true to a certain extent, but when you get older you will learn that it isn’t just him in charge and that maybe some of his ideas on running a country might not be quite as good as you are told now. So you have been taught something that is real and you will believe it is real but maybe it isn’t as real as you think it is because there are levels of real.B: So what is real?

BAM! Right there I manage to tell a 6 year old she is being taught a pack of lies at school and the Prime Minister /or the person in charge of the country she lives in is not a good person. I am not even sure how this actually relates to the question of what is real….. I have already talked myself into a cul-de-sac.

M: So let’s look at this another way. Look at the street around us. Everything around us is real.

There – recovered – gone for the simple answer. Which would have worked, had I not cast doubt on her education moments before.

B: How do I know it is real?

If only I had a time machine – scrolled forward and plucked my wife’s answer from her lips and rebooted the conversation I could have avoided what came next. But why stick to the tangible when I can call upon Plato’s Parable of the Cave to really screw up my daughter’s grasp of the world around her, after all I have her doubting her teachers so why not go the whole hog and drive a very large splinter of doubt into her own conscious recognition of the world.

M: Well basically you don’t know what is real or not. Nobody does. There was a man from Ancient Greece…B: I am not doing Greece as a topic… I am doing the Tudors.M: I know you are (shame Plato wasn’t a Tudor, this might have gone a bit easier). But this guy was from Ancient Greece. He was called Pluto. He was a philosopher. Do you know what a philosopher is?B: Its in Harry Potter 1.M: A philosopher is a person who is really clever who thinks up reasons for why things are like they are.B: OK. Does he make stuff up?M: Umm… sort of – but it is generally to help us understand things.B: so it isn’t real?M: Well this person, Plato, was really good at helping us see things. He said imagine if you were in a cave, all your life…

I am pretty sure this is what Blondie thinks Plato looks like

I need to say – I paraphrase heavily from this point – basically missing a lot of the nuance of the parable. My inner voice is telling me to shut up – begging me to cease in this pointless part recollected theoretical rant on the perception of reality. Blondie has long since lost interest in the answer to her question – we are now filling time as we wait for Ginger and Mrs M to get back from the other end of the High Street.. But stupidly I plough on determined (probably through my own vanity) to deliver a wise sermon to my youngest child.

M: …..and all you could see were shadows on the cave wall in front of you. And voices talking about stuff so that you think they are telling you what the shadows are. Then those shadows would be the real things to you – and you would think those things were what you heard…

I am failing badly here. I have lost my way and even my point and I am now relying on a 6 year old to pick apart my pathetic attempt at philosophical teaching to find the answer she yearns for.

M: ……But if you were suddenly set free and you saw what was making the shadows (I am making stuff up now) then you would see what was actually real and you would learn that what was once real to you was real but you have now learnt a new more real real.

I think I need to repeat what I have just said. This is my actual answer to a 6 year old’s question – What is real? Just let that sit for a while - soak it up.

IF YOU WERE SUDDENLY SET FREE AND YOU SAW WHAT WAS MAKING THE SHADOWS THEN YOU WOULD SEE WHAT WAS ACTUALLY REAL AND YOU WOULD LEARN THAT WHAT WAS ONCE REAL TO YOU WAS REAL BUT YOU HAVE NOW LEARNT A NEW MORE REAL REAL.

The teaching profession must really be kicking itself that it was unable to persuade me to join their ranks.

Blondie, to her credit, took this on-board. Rolled it around her head for a short while. Then came back with:

B: so shadows aren’t real?M: There are real. B: So what is real then?M: Oh look, here’s Mummy…..

This morning the girls were dressing in 80s clothes for school, presumably it was decided that the 80s was our funniest decade and thus most suitable for Comic Relief. Anyhow, Ginger was wearing an old t-shirt of mine that sports the Atari logo; she asked why it was 80s. I resisted the strong temptation to take her on a journey that started with Binatone console, visited the ZX Spectrum, bounced on a Commodore 64 and ended with BBC Lynx all by way of explaining why we went to the arcade to play ‘video games’. I just said, ‘it was a bit like a Wii we I was a kid.’

I am learning. My kids are probably learning even more as a result.