S3:E24 // Fixing the World in 10 Easy Steps

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Two years ago, on March 17, 2020, the world went into lockdown and we released our very first episode of Shelter in Place.

I remember waking up each day not quite believing that it was real, that our world could shift so suddenly, changing everything that would follow.

But at some point that disbelief shifted to resignation, and then recognition. The world has always needed fixing; the pandemic just made it harder to ignore.

It feels especially broken right now. So this week, when every day brings more bad news and problems that won’t easily be solved, when once again the world feels like it’s falling apart,

we’re taking a moment to remind ourselves that joy and pain have always coexisted, that our ability to live in the tension between them is what makes us human.

Because two years ago when we were shutting in and hunkering down, there was someone in our life who was doing his best to stretch up tall, to embrace another year as a brand new 8-year-old who has always been a little short for his age.

Gabriel says that he doesn’t really remember life before the pandemic. He’s forgotten the disappointment of his canceled birthday party that week, or how we tried to salvage a celebration with family even as we were all scrambling to adjust to our new pandemic reality. Only from pictures does he recall the green clovers and happy birthday messages we painted on our windows that remained there for weeks.

Just as our world has changed and adjusted these past two years, so has Gabriel. Our most listened-to episode to date is called the Lotus Eaters, where educator and author Susan Wise Bauer talked about the challenges so many of us were facing with school on screen. Gabriel’s story is at the heart of that episode, and it’s still one of my favorites more than a year later.

Yes, we know we’re coming up on our 2-year-anniversary as a show, and we’ll get to that later this month. But we want to kick off this month by pulling out that piñata that has been sitting in the basement for the last two years and celebrating our boy in a way we weren’t able to back then.

If there’s anything I’ve learned as I’ve watched the numbers tick up on my own birthdays, it’s that there’s always more to learn, and sometimes the the ones who aren’t claiming authority have the most to teach us.

So today, as he gears up for turning ten, we’re consulting Gabe on how to fix the world, and we’re doing it just the way Gabriel likes it: with a checklist.

Nate: Fix the World in 10 Easy Steps, or the world according to Gabriel.

Laura: Step 1: Make a list

Nate: Gabe is a productivity guru in a ten-year-old’s body. He has checklists for everything. If we drop the ball as parents and forget the rules we’ve set down, he’s got us covered. A few examples?

Here’s his checklist for good manners at the Davis house:

☑Do all your chores.

☑No yelling please.

☑No fighting please.

☑Be respectful.

☑Eye on the one who is talking (eyeball drawing included).

☑Say “thank you” and “please before and after meals.

☑No elbows, or feet, on the table.

☑No saying “I don’t like [fill in the blank].”

There are also one-off checklists, like the one he made last month for the kids in his class—and also in his sisters’ classes—who should receive Valentines. Or the checklist of Gabe’s favorite Harry Potter characters, or most-prized Legos.

Laura: We don’t have a cat, but there’s a checklist on our fridge right now for “the cat’s menu,” which in case you want to place an order, includes 1) fish. 2) tuna fish, 3) fish sticks, 4) cod, 5) catfish, 6) salmon, and 7) more fish.

Nate: If you’re thinking, “wow, I am SO impressed with this kid! Sign me up for the salmon!” We’re right there with you. But also, the caveat to these lists is that most of the time, they’re quickly abandoned or repurposed as a mermaid drawing by his 5-year-old sister (you can check out our episode “How Can This Be?” for Mattéa’s vision of a better world).

For all of that planning, the Valentines themselves never did make it to school, the cat we don’t have is still very hungry, and I can tell you that in the fight for good manners at the Davis house there is plenty of fighting, yelling, and saying “I don’t like” pretty much everything on that list.

Laura: To be fair, he’s just a kid. If his parents were a little better at completing their own ever-expanding checklists those Valentines might have made it to school. In our productivity-obsessed culture, it’s easy to be critical of the lack of follow-through, which is the subject of our New Year’s Eve episode, “Productivity Unhacked,” and one of my personal favorites.

Maybe you are a unicorn of the human race and your to do list gets completed every single day—yes, we’re talking about you, Melissa Lent. Maybe that cat gets a rotating menu like clockwork and life always happens on schedule.

But even for those of us who are more like Gabe in our list-making habits, the bigger lesson we can learn is that while lists won’t fix the world, living intentionally will get us closer to where we want to be.

Nate: This thing that Gabriel is doing with pencils and scratch paper and pictures of cats is what we’re trying to do with our lives: work toward a better normal, one day, one list, and one episode at a time.

Oh, and Gabe? Can we talk about the “shark fins” you recently added to your cat menu?

Laura: Step 2: Wash your hands.

Nate: Gabe is . . . how can we put this delicately . . . very concerned about cleanliness and order. You know that trick of teaching kids to sing happy birthday while they wash their hands? Gabe was all over that years ago. Even pre-pandemic, he would sometimes wash his hands so often that we’d have to slather ointment on his red, chapped hands and wrists.

Laura: I still remember the first time I noticed Gabriel’s tendency to tidiness, when he was a toddler and I walked into his room and saw that he’d lined up his matchbox cars in perfectly ordered rows like a big box store parking lot. I texted Nate a picture of it with the message, “cute or OCD?”

Nate: We’re keeping an eye out for the latter, but in the meantime, Gabe’s commitment to cleanliness is a good reminder that sometimes avoiding life’s sickness and trouble can be simpler than we think.

Laura: Nowadays, handwashing feels so obvious, but it’s only in the last 200 years that handwashing became a lynchpin of public health and medicine after some Austrian doctors in the 1800s noticed that the maternity clinic where the medical students washed their hands had lower mortality rates.

Nate: In some ways, Gabe was just waiting for the pandemic so the rest of us could get with the program. He’s been carrying his own personal hand sanitizer in his backpack since kindergarten. While grownups were moaning and groaning about masks and hand sanitizer dispensers at the entrance of every store, Gabe was high-fiving his sisters—right after he’d made sure they’d sanitized their hands.

Laura: Step 3: Wear a cape.

Nate: Back in the early 2000s, when the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, my mom sewed an olive-green wool cape for my brother Elliot so he could go to the premiere as Frodo. Elliot is in his thirties now, and we all got a good chuckle out of that story last year when we living in Massachusetts and my mom rediscovered the cape during a back basement cleanup.

The only person not laughing was Gabe, who was eyeing the cape with longing and determination. When Uncle Elliot told Gabe he could have it if he wanted, Gabe didn’t hesitate for a second.

From that day forth, Gabe rarely left the house without it. It became the outerwear for all kinds of weather, his most cherished possession. Even when summer came and we were out hiking in 80-degree East coast humidity, he was insistent that he needed it. Whenever he was running down the sidewalk with his cape flying behind him, or donning the hood at the grocery store, he’d get compliments from kids and adults alike. Everyone loved Gabe’s cape.

Laura: I mean, it is a pretty great cape. But I think part of what made the cape so great is that it tapped into a side of Gabe’s personality that he doesn’t often show, the part of him that still believes in heroes and magic. While the rest of us are doing ordinary things like walking or eating, Gabe is secretly constructing whole worlds and histories inside his head. Even though I know this about Gabe, it still occasionally surprises me.

Uncle Elliot, the original cape-wearer moved to California recently, and so we got to be with him for his birthday this fall. Gabe was quiet on the drive up to my sister-in-law’s house, and when we arrived, he gifted Uncle Elliot with a hand-written, effortlessly hilarious fictionalized story of Elliot’s life that was the hit of the party.

Gabe—and his cape—reminds me that there is more to the people around me than I sometimes realize. All of us—with the right guidance or circumstances or cape—have the potential to work magic and become heroes.

Nate: Which brings us to step 4 of how to fix the world: save the arts.

Laura: Those of you who are parents might remember those early pandemic days, when Mo Willems was doing daily YouTube videos to teach kids how to draw. It was the first time I realized how much my kids loved drawing—and Gabe in particular—who began sketching Piggy and Gerald on every notebook, folder, and whiteboard.

I think we were all a little sad when those Mo Willems videos fell by the wayside. And also, hats off to you for keeping it up as long as you did, Mo. The daily thing is NO JOKE.

Nate: Thankfully, Gabriel quickly found a classy replacement: Captain Underpants! Or in Spanish, Capitan Calcatines. (?)

For those of you not already familiar with the mind-bindingly prolific children’s author and illustrator of such renowned titles as “Captain Underpants: The Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets” and “Dog Man #9: Grime and Punishment,” Dav Pilkey has mastered the art and science of elementary-school humor in his dozens of books.

Laura: At first, I was a Captain Underpants skeptic. But after listening to a Gabriel retell the adventures of Hombre Perro (Gabriel enjoys Dav Pilkey’s books in Spanish as much as in English) and then glimpsing the elaborate comic strips that Gabriel felt inspired to write and draw, I remembered my own childhood reading, which was largely dominated by the Babysitters Club and a lot of books about girls who rode horses. I did eventually get interested in Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, but in the beginning I just wanted reading that gave me a way to escape.

Nate: Because that’s what art can do for us. It can give voice to the way we’re feeling, and remind us that we’re not alone. It can make us feel seen and understood.

If we dig under the poop jokes—as the giant stack of pencil-drawn cartoons littering the desk shows —what Dav Pilkey is doing—and inspiring Gabe to do, is something not too different than what we’ve been trying to do through Shelter in Place: reimagine life through creativity and community, and not take ourselves too seriously in the process.

And speaking of underpants, step five in Gabriel’s how to fix the world? Never miss a chance to make ‘em laugh.

Laura: “Why did the toolbox go to a contest?

Because he wanted to nail it.”

Nate: “Why did the cucumber want to get out of the jar?

Because he was in a pickle.”

Laura: “Why did the strawberry jump out of the jar? Because he was in a jam!”

Nate: Waaah-wah!

These are just a few of the choicest selections on a document that Gabriel composed recently—which I may or may not have helped make up—titled, “Supa Supa awesome jokes.”

Puns aside, there’s a serious life lesson here: we could all use a little more laughter in our lives.

Laura: The Mayo Clinic recommends laughter as an antidote to stress in their post titled, “Stress relief from laughter? It’s no joke.” They credit laughter with stimulating our hearts, lungs, muscles, and many other organs, enhancing intake of oxygen-rich air, increasing endorphin release, and cooling down our stress response, leaving us feeling good. And those are just some of the short-term benefits of laughter.

The long-term effects of laughter include an improved immune system, relief from pain, increased personal satisfaction, better coping mechanisms in difficult situations, improved mental health, and increased connection with others.

And this isn’t just good news for those of us who are naturally funny.

Humor can be learned. The authors suggest surrounding yourself with pictures or comic strips or videos—or say, kids’ books with a lot of silly bathroom humor—and looking at them and laughing at them often—even if it feels forced at first. It turns out that forced laughter still works, because it often turns into spontaneous laughter, so much so that Laughter Yoga is a thing. People practice laughing as a group to help each other laugh.

“Laugh and the world laughs with you,” said the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. If laughing together makes us healthier and happier and more connected, this step of Gabe’s really might just do something to fix the world.

Nate: And speaking of laughter, step six in Gabe’s list of how to fix the world is one that makes our kids giggle often: the pillow game.

Years ago, when our kids were too small to hurt me with physical force, I came up with a game to play on our backyard trampoline. Here’s how it goes:

You start with a vintage down pillow, like one of the ones my grandma handed down to my mom. Then while all the kids jump on the trampoline, you toss the pillow up in the air and try to chop it half with the hedge clippers. When you hit the pillow just right, it bursts in midair, while the kids shriek with delight as they cavort in a snowstorm of feathers.

Just kidding. You think I would really jump on the trampoline with hedge clippers and a bunch of kids? (I use the hand shears for that.)

So here’s how the pillow game really goes (no dangerous yard tools involved): I get in the middle of the trampoline, and pretend to be a monster. I try to catch the kids running around the perimeter. When I catch one, I lie down and use that kid as a pillow, pretending to take a nap, while all the other kids combine forces to try to free that one who’s been caught. When they eventually pry the trapped kid loose, I do my best grumpy baby impersonation to indicate that my nap has been ruined, and then—usually when Laura calls out the back door to please stop that awful sound—we begin again.

Repeat ad nauseam, or until someone gets hurt.

Laura: Even though I find that 45-year-old baby incredibly annoying, I have to admit that the pillow game has been a good staple in our family. As adults, most of our lives are sedentary. We think we have to make an event of working out or start some new training plan to be healthy, but we often underestimate the joy of just moving our bodies, which is something I talked about in two of our recent episodes, “Dancing Saved My Life,” and “Finding the Fuego.”

And there’s also this: just as laughter can make us better, so can play.

In March of 2021 Alison Tonkina and Julia Whitakera of Stanmore College published a study that examined whether playfulness could mitigate some of the negative effects of a pandemic. They found that playfulness was a powerful coping strategy to reframe a time characterized by stress and fear.

Definitions of what play is vary across cultures, but is often associated with activity that is open-ended with no fixed outcome. Play England defines play as ‘what children and young people do when they follow their own ideas and interests, in their own way, and for their own reasons.’

In his book “A Playful Path,” Bernard De Koven says that playfulness is a gift that ‘allows you to transform the very things you take seriously into opportunities for shared laughter.’

Comic Relief is a UK organization whose stated mission is to drive positive change through the power of entertainment. Every year since 1988, Comic Relief has hosted Red Nose Day, where people join forces to raise money for charitable causes around the world, while wearing red clown noses. Red Nose Day is coming up on March 18, by the way, so you still have time to head to Comic Relief’s website and get your own red nose.

As Comic Relief says, “we need the power of funny to turn laughs into lasting change.”

The pillow game may not fix the world, but at least for those who are playing it, it makes living in it a little more bearable. So next time I hear that annoying fake baby cry, I might just join in.

Nate: But let’s get back on track with our world-fixing. Step seven on Gabe’s list is to know when to strive for perfection—and when to let good enough be good enough.

Laura: Sometimes when I am feeling worn down by the selective hearing that occurs whenever we ask the kids to do something that will require them to stop playing, or I find yet another discarded dress that was part of Mattéa’s daily wardrobe selection, it helps to remind myself of how it used to be in the Before Times, when 100% of the household chores fell to Nate and me.

Yes, there’s still plenty of nagging and yes, the house still spontaneously coughs up clutter like an allergic reaction to being cleaned, but when I think about where we started just two years ago, it puts it all in perspective.

Nate: It’s amazing how when watching TV is the incentive, the kids suddenly have superpowers when it comes to cleaning. Gabriel puts his list-making skills to good use while Grace delegates. They tag-team folding laundry and vacuuming, and even Mattéa grabs the short broom that’s just her size and starts sweeping.

But there is one task that suits Gabe better than all the rest, that taps into that fastidious personality we hinted at above: unloading the dishwasher.

Since all the items have just been through a scalding bath, they are all perfectly sanitized so he doesn’t have to worry about germs. His orderly nature is a great fit, so to speak, for aligning each silverware item perfectly atop its fellows.

(Of course, the first time someone pulls the drawer open, all the silverware slides into a jumble, but it’s the kind of attention to detail that Steve Jobs supposedly lavished on the innards of the first Macintosh computers. “Who’s going to know how the inside looks? I will.”)

There are moments when I get a little impatient with Gabe’s persnickitude, in particular when he boxes out Mattea from helping because she’s not nesting the spoons properly, but on the other hand, I have to salute the instinct to create a little order in a disorderly world.

Many great thinkers and creators have advocated for a neat environment as an aid to creativity. As the French author Gustave Flaubert put it, ““Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Laura: Gabriel makes plenty of room for that wild and original flair as well, like say in the tiny legos that I often step on in the middle of the living room floor, or the pile of dirt that has casually been left behind by the vacuum. My own tendency in cleaning is to strive for the same perfection that Gabe works toward with his silverware stacking, but then I’ll hear Gabe running the vacuum when I haven’t even asked him to and I think, “meh, better done than perfect.” We’re still moving in the right direction.

Which brings us to the eighth step of fixing the world: make do with less.

Nate: Every morning before Gabe gets in the shower, he lays out different versions of the same outfit: a t-shirt, warmup pants, and on cold days, his gray zip-up fleece. When he leaves the house, the only shoes he needs are his black tennis shoes. Gabe has more important things on his mind than clothing. There’s a world out there to fix, remember?

Laura: Gabriel didn’t get this commitment to simplicity from his parents. I’ve heard about thinkers and artists who chose to dress in the same outfit everyday to save their decision-making powers for things that matter, and periodically I try it myself, but the practice has never stuck. Early in our relationship Nate and I bonded over our love of thrift store shopping because we could choose from endless variety without feeling guilty for spending too much money.

But there is someone in the family who shares Gabe’s preference for simplicity. We featured him in our December episode, “The theology of listening.” He’s Professor John Jefferson Davis to his seminary students, but to Gabe, he’s Pop Pop.

Nate: Growing up and today, my pop’s outfits could be counted on one hand. There was the blue sweater, the red sweater, and the same khaki pants and loafers for all occasions. I can remember several occasions where my mom would pull something out of his closet for him to wear and he’d say, “that isn’t mine,” because he’d forgotten he owned it.

I think Gabe and my pop have a lot in common, which came to light last year when we were living near my parents in Massachusetts and eating dinner with them most weeknights. They have the same can’t-be-bothered-with-real-life breeziness about them, the same ability to tune out the rest of life when a book or project captivates them. Clothing and food are just things they have to accomplish each day to get to the more interesting things that mostly live inside their own heads.

Laura: And as much as I can’t help myself from fluttering near the flame of variety in everything I do, I have to say that I do think Gabriel and Pop Pop are onto something. So much of our dissatisfaction in life comes from our endless craving for more—more money, more things, more choices.

But what if we could make do with less? What if we could remind ourselves that the real spice of life is found not in things we can consume, but ideas we can explore together? We might just start to heal a few of the places where we’ve been broken.

Nate: And speaking of doing with less, step nine in Gabe’s world-fixing list is to say less.

Laura: When Gabe was a baby and I was a new mom with ambitions of not letting parenthood change my life the slightest bit, I can remember taking him to parties strapped to my chest. I couldn’t wait to show off how cute he was, for my friends to hear his sweet baby babble and his gleeful smile.

He’d chatter away unintelligibly on the drive over and giggle when I got him out of his carseat and into the carrier. And then as the door swung open and my friends welcomed us inside, he went silent . . . and stayed that way until the party was over or we went home.

The first couple of times this happened, it stunned me. How could the same kid who talked nonstop suddenly become this stone-faced silent baby who looked wide-eyed at the world like it might swallow him whole?

Years later when he went to preschool, his teacher pulled me aside one day and asked me, “does he ever talk at home?”

“Nonstop,” I told her. But at school he was quiet, preferring to hang back and do crafts while the other kids were running around the playground.

Eventually, I learned to appreciate this about Gabe, to understand that he needed to be in the world first as an observer, and only later as a commentator. That it was important for him to understand the people he was with before he let his guard down. It’s not a bad way to live, actually, to listen and observe before you decide to talk.

Nate: Even though Gabe has learned to speak up more in school and assert himself when it’s needed, he’s still quiet in new situations. As a fellow introvert, I can relate. When Laura and I were first dating and she brought me to a barbecue to meet fifty of her closest college friends, I was so overwhelmed by meeting so many new people that I snuck off to read a book under a nearby tree.

American culture rewards extroversion, but sometimes I wonder if we’d all be better off if we could appreciate the introverted virtues just as much. Learning to be quiet—to be comfortable enough with both yourself and others to just be—is a skill that few of us possess. In the words of philosopher Blaise Pascal, “All of humanity's problems stem from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Learning to be present, to not need to fill the silence with activity or chatter, is what we’re after in meditation and mindfulness practices. It’s a gift to feel comfortable enough in your own skin to just be quiet, and it’s a gift to others to be a friend who doesn’t always need to fill the silence with noise.

Laura: Seven years ago, when Gabe was only three, we met a family who lived a few blocks away from us who would end up becoming some of our closest neighborhood friends. We started watching each other’s kids, noticing our kids’ similarities and differences. Their three kids are the same ages as ours, and over the years our kids have attended preschool and now elementary school together, carpooling in the mornings and often playing together after school.

Even when they were toddlers, Ellena and Gabe seemed to understand each other. They’ve always been comfortable with each other, just as happy reading books or silently playing legos as they are talking. I used to take this friendship for granted, but the older they get, the more I appreciate what they are giving to each other: the simple gift of presence. There’s no pressure to fill the space with words and questions (as we often tend to do). They don’t have to prove themselves to each other. It’s enough to just be in each other’s company. They do sometimes talk, but more often than not they’re content to just sit and read, the unspoken message, that the friendship they offer to each other is exactly what they need.

Especially after two years of mostly not seeing friends, of seeing so many friendships fall by the wayside because my ability to show up or keep up with long distance communication fell short, I’m appreciating friendships like the one Gabe and Ellena have. Not everyone can extend friendship without expectations and requirements, but when you find those friendships that allow you to be messy and flawed and inconsistent and—yes, quiet—it’s a rare and precious gift, one that could make our world a kinder place to live.

Nate: Which brings us to the last of our ten steps in how to fix the world. When all else fails, get out your night vision goggles and go into stealth mode.

Laura: Gabe has another friend who has been in his life even longer than Ellena: Miles. Miles is a year younger than Gabe, and he was the very first friend Gabe ever had. Their friendship has always been a special one, but it’s also sometimes been complicated, because—how can I say this—the world Miles moves in is often a lot more pleasant than the one we’re usually living in.

Miles is the only child of the insanely talented jazz musicians Kenny Washington and Suzanna Smith, who have a talent both for making great music and for raising an incredibly sweet, respectful, and—at least to our ears—quiet and compliant boy.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard Miles cry or throw a tantrum over the years. With our kids? Somebody is always having a meltdown (and yes, sometimes that somebody is me).

Suzanna, Kenny, and Miles are beloved friends in spite of the many outbursts and annoyances they’ve had to put up with living right next to us for the past fourteen years.

Nate: So you can imagine my surprise when Miles showed up on our front porch armed with an arsenal of nerf guns.

I knew I’d been living in the left-of-liberal Bay Area for a long time when the sight of those nerf guns made me feel a little squeamish. Suzanna sheepishly apologized, saying that they’d been given as a gift.

But less than an hour later I was sold. All it took was seeing our kids and Miles peering over fences and racing down driveways to the barely audible pop-pop-pop of nerf darts to remind me of the childlike joy of sneaking around in the dark.

As a 45-year-old dad, I’d forgotten how being part of one team against another, is just fun! There’s a simple adrenaline pleasure in crouching behind the minivan, peeking around the corner to try to pop a kid with a nerf dart while avoiding getting tagged yourself, and then turning around just in time to see your two-foot-tall five-year-old daughter fire a nerf gun as big as she is and say, “gotcha, Daddy.”

At Shelter in Place, we’re all about creating a welcoming virtual space where everyone can feel seen, celebrated, and safe.

But since we’re also always looking for the bigger life lesson here, I think what those nerf skirmishes can teach us is the importance of working out conflict with clear rules and with safe precautions. My natural tendency is to try to avoid conflict, but those nerf gun battles remind me that learning to fight fair and have each other’s backs almost always leads to a better outcome. Also, it’s just really fun to sneak around in the dark wearing camouflage.

So here’s to another year of fixing the world your way, Gabriel. You’re a good boy, and we love you so much.