Sea School - Lessons from 'My Octopus Teacher'

 

I loved 'My Octopus Teacher' so much that saying anything more than that I urge you to watch it as soon as you can, ideally with your children, seems a waste of time and words. Nonetheless I will venture some thoughts as to why I think this documentary is so much more significant and important than your common or garden Attenborough.

This is a deeply personal programme but also one which is itself a lesson of universal application. Reduced to its barest bones it's: man goes swimming, man meets octopus, man loves octopus. Characterised in that way it sounds absolutely absurd, troubling even. But that isn't really it at all.

Its narrator/director/protagonist, Craig Foster, is not a famous man. Nor is there anything about this programme, or him in it, that suggests that he has any interest in the pursuit of fame. He is very softly spoken, totally untheatrical or breathlessly wondering in his commentary. And yet all of that serves only to make his commentary all the more remarkable.

The sea in which Foster swam every day is both bountiful but also fraught with danger. He does not spell out what was going on in his personal life when he started his endeavour but it seems plain that he was contending with some kind of crisis or trauma. In that sense swimming clearly became catharsis for him.

He explains early on that he did not want a wetsuit or diving gear. We are not in our natural element swimming underwater for prolonged periods but practice, focus and determination permit us to journey there. There are growing numbers of studies that cold water swimming is not just beneficial for our physical health but our mental wellbeing also. It is difficult to give too much prominence to mental demons when you are literally being buffeted by huge waves.

Something that we do require, if life is worth living, is a purpose. In this film Foster finds a purpose and yet it's a purpose so far removed from what the vast majority of us regard as being significant and essential. His purpose is to observe, record and chronicle this octopus' life.

Suffice to say bearing witness to the ingenuity, versatility and playfulness of this octopus' existence makes the prospect of a plateful of calamari seem almost a desecration. One thing this programme does not do is solemnly intone about man's devastating destruction of the seas. Instead it revels in their richness and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions about the true price we pay for plundering and polluting earth's natural habitats.

For me the most affecting part of the show is when Foster is joined by his young son and he comments proudly on how strong a swimmer he has become. This is, after all, a blog about fathering, and I seize upon models of fathers communing with their sons. Shared activity, shared values and shared joy.

Watch it now.

Trailer - https://youtu.be/3s0LTDhqe5A

The Golden Treasury

 

There was a moment today when my wife was rolling on the floor laughing with our 3 year old and the baby joined in giggling from his high chair. He wasn't being played with or obviously included but he knew there was fun and he was part of it. I wanted to nail that moment down, or preserve it in aspic or press it between the pages of an album. But before I knew it the moment had gone, the baby resumed smearing yoghurt all over his face and the 3 year old his demands for the iPad.

'Sharenting' and baby spam is a demonstration of parental desire to share joy in children with the outside world. Some parents give in to an impulse to record every second of their children's lives in a bid to arrest the passage of time. Obviously, audio, video and photographic records of family times are important but they are vastly less important than what they are seeking to capture, which is time itself.

'Treasure every moment' and 'It goes so fast' are both trite pieces of parental advice but they're no less true for that. The word treasure carries for me a particularly powerful symbolism. Our shared joy in the kitchen was just a moment but it was a moment of genuine family communion. All taking pleasure in the same thing at the same time.

That moment is like an ounce of gold and although the moment passes the value of it never does. In fact that ounce of gold, whether you realise it or not, is securely deposited in the individual and collective memories of the whole family. And as the days, months and years pass every such moment is added to the balance creating a golden treasury. That treasury will end up holding more value in the family's heart than any bank account or investment portfolio ever could.

When sadness, tragedy, illness, grief and bereavement come, and come most surely will, then is the time to draw on those reserves. In fortunate families those reserves will be full and sustaining, in others they will be scant and unconsoling. You can not pay money into that treasury and you can not employ others to pay into it for you.

Real presence in the lives of small children comes at a real cost, of sleep, of patience, of intellectual stimulation but it is also the time for gathering those ounces of gold and, like a prospector panning for gold above San Francisco, it's not gifted to you it has to be worked for. But the conditions are ripe. Your children when they are small don't just want you in their lives they need you in their lives.

A time will come when children want distance and independence. Gathering gold then is difficult and, like any investment, will accumulate much less interest for being made late in the day. A day of fun in a small child's life seems an eternity because their life is so short, a day of fun in the life of a 20 year old is but one of thousands of days.

'Do the work' has been something of a catchphrase this year and it is one that could not be more aptly applied to bringing up children, that is how you become rich in reminiscence.

Pockets of Loveliness

 

I don't remember all my school assemblies. Occasionally, however, the headmaster would use the opportunity to take the school to task for bad behaviour that had been reported to him. His evocative expression for this was 'pockets of ghastliness'. That expression came to mind when my 3 year old recently started assembling a rock collection.

Many of the rocks he collects are far too big for my pockets let alone his but they presage a period of boyhood that I think is little observed or commented upon. It is sometimes said that if you want to know a woman make an inventory of her handbag, hence the fascination with what the Queen carries in hers. But if you want to know the soul of a small boy turn out his pockets.

These pockets of loveliness can often contain the unloveliest things but they contain the things of value to the boy and that makes them valuable. It is often difficult for me to understand why my son discerns value in one rock rather than another but if he catches me decanting them from the car he takes tremendous umbrage.

In some unseen and unexplained way these stones have captured his imagination and it is wondrous how small children have an instinctive and comfortable relationship with their imagination. Most children will take a screen over self-motivated play but if you take the screen away from them they have an immediate and easy access to their imagination in a way that should be the envy of most adults.

It's interesting how we talk about imaginations being captured as if they have to be confined like birds in an aviary or tamed like a savage beast. In fact children need to be encouraged to allow their imaginations to roam wild and free, safe in the knowledge that they will never be mocked or punished for where their imagination takes them.

My son's favourite stone, with which he insists on sleeping, is in fact a piece of slate which bizarrely he calls 'My father's journal'. I have no idea why he calls it this but suffice it to say I am fairly certain he is not a reader of this blog. I don't believe that my son is an embryonic geologist and I don't doubt that in time the rocks and pebbles will give way to marbles, foreign coins, small toys, and feathers. When they do I fully intend to chronicle these ephemeral evocations of who he really is.