This late winter and spring, we are dabbling. I am trying to embrace dabbling. As a child, I was a dabbler so severe that I drove my parents to distraction as I signed up for classes, then promptly decided that I wanted to do something else. They didn’t always let me switch, of course.
As an adult, I’ve figured out that my dabbling has been good for me. Now it all forms a cohesive whole. Social justice volunteer work, gardening, environmental education all fuse together to form what is simply my life, and that works for me.
In some ways, this winter I am encouraging my daughter to dabble. Dabbling brings ducks to mind, and I have visions of her paddling slowly around the pond, poking her head into corners to look for tasty morsels. Perhaps she finds a distasteful weed, perhaps a tasty new bug. It’s all about exploration.
This is what we’re doing this spring. So many of the classes children can take demand an entire year of commitment. I don’t know about your small child, but mine can’t really conceive of that length of time, and her passions in life aren’t so well-defined yet. So we are trying things out to see what she enjoys doing before we take a long-term class.
At the moment, she got into the last 4 sessions of a Mandarin class near our home, and she’s adoring it. She’s going for violin lessons with a private teacher every so often, just to see if she’d like to pursue that. She’s also doing skating, a continuation from the fall, because she loves that. Of course, we also have all of our usual activities such as walks in the woods.
Yes, this dabbling leads to a bit of a weird schedule, but I think that it will be useful. Kids have a hard time deciding whether they would enjoy something if they haven’t tried it, and what better way to try than to dip your feet in for a little while and get a taste of what’s in that corner of the pond?
Image courtesy of Beverly LR at Stock Exchange.