PANIC

a Reflection by Mary M. Leue

(from the Journal of Family Life, Fall, 1994)

 

 

.... Looking back at the age of eighty-one on my own course work during high school. college. graduate school and nurse's training. I realize that what I have retained proves out. again and again to be the information I wanted and so "took" for myself - not the rote memorization I was asked to produce for each course! --- Could it be that what I had mainly been learning was that it was necessary to panic in order to learn? ....

 

I wake up, gasping, feeling my heart pound wildly. It's that old dream again! Why now? I've not had it for years! It's so vivid. I'm running up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Now I'm racing down the wide hallway glancing at room numbers, frantically searching for mine. Nowhere! Am I even on the right floor? Why can't I remember? Where is everyone? Oh, right - it's so late, they're all safely seated at their desks in their own classrooms, but I can't even find mine! And the English final exam is beginning. Where is my classroom? At this point, my teacher probably won't even let me take it! Panic!

 

I was fortunate enough to be asked (by the children themselves) to teach a semester-long course in the history of religions at our alternative school during the second half of the school year, meeting once a week. This was a group of from six to nine kids ranging in age from nine to eleven, the number varying according to attendance - which was totally voluntary. At the end of the school year, I asked six kids, who had come every time, to write me essays based on the semester's work of about a computer-page in length, telling them they could write whatever they pleased about it - or on the topic of religion per se. or on one particular relihion. What was really on their own minds, in other words.

 

What I got back from them two weeks later was a set of eloquent thought-pieces which would grace a college-level course! This experience taught me all over again how profound are the musings of children given the space to express themselves authentically, on a subject dear to their own hearts! Left to their own devices, different children focused very differently on the same material, each one extracting from it some material which touched her/him personally. I found this impressive. I had known this was how I learn, left to my own devices, but when I compared this clearly authentic and individualized learning style with the conventional definition of learning in a "curriculum-centered' school (or college) course where students are required to "feed back" to the teacher - on quizzes, tests, final examinations - evidence of their having absorbed all the material from the course in order to receive an optimal grade, I became newly aware of how artificial we have made formal learning, how unlike the natural way learning takes place. Because what each of these kids had to say about the course was deeply reflective!

 

Why do we demand this artificial standard of students? Is it so hard to see how dysfunctional it is? Why do we want to teach kids that learning is something to be forced - to be feared? Looking back at the age of seventy-four on my own course work during high school, college, graduate school and nurse's training, I realize that although I usually exerted myself to study, always with anxiety and often reluctantly, and to give back as full and accurate a discourse on the subject matter of each course as I could manage, what I have retained proves out, again and again, to be the information I wanted and so "took" for myself - not the rote memorization I was asked to produce for each course! That panic has faded and is no longer mine. Could it be that what I had mainly been learning was that it was necessary to panic in order to learn?

 

So let's look at the role of panic in our lives. First, it strikes me that panic is the reaction of choice with which many, perhaps even most, students, like me, are forced to motivate themselves to be in a frame of mind to respond to the challenge of their school courses of study. But second, in studying afresh the lives of ancient Greek gods and goddesses in the course we did together, I was reminded of the life of Pan himself, who is the great god of nature from whose name our term "panic' stems. What is the connection between Pan and panic? It's an interesting story.

 

It seems that when Pan was born to his mother, the nymph Callisto, the newborn baby was so ugly (by human standards), having horns, a goat's beard and feet and a tail, and being completely covered with hair, that she could not bear to look at him, and so, ran away! The god Hermes took the baby to Olympus, where he became a favorite of all the gods and goddesses, especially the god Dionysius.

 

Pan's home was Arcadia. He was a rustic god who protected and gave fertility to flocks, who hunted and fished, and who played and danced with mountain nymphs. He loved music, and invented the "pan pipes" from reeds of different lengths. He lived in caves or in the woods, and sometimes inspired men with terror (i.e., "panic") when they encountered him unexpectedly in the woods. On the other hand, he himself was subject to attacks of terror at the sight of mortals - being the god of nature - and thus was very shy, as well as aware of his own appearance in the eyes of mortals - and his unearthly screams when surprised expressed his own panic at men who heard them.

 

During the religions course we read many stories about the Greek gods and goddesses, and sometimes I would supplement these accounts with descriptions of my own experiences on a classical tour in Greece in 1984. A passage from the book I wrote about these experiences on returning gives an account of our coming down from the Olympian mountains into Arcadia:

 

... Coming down out of these mountains and into the plain of Arcadia was awesome, and not only to me. This broad stretch of valley lay like a garden, sunny and green, dotted liberally with fruit trees, flower and vegetable gardens and pleasant, prosperous-looking villages. Over it all hung a kind of delicate, golden haze which felt celestial in some way. Truly I could believe that the god Pan lived there, and that he was still watching over this blessed region!

 

-- (Rushing to Eva; a Pilgrimage in Search of the Great Mother,

Down-to-Earth Books, 1985, p. 251)

 

Reliving this experience in describing it to the children brought back all over again the sense I had had of the sacredness of this spot! Pan's name has also been linked with the spiritual community of Findhorn founded by Peter and Eileen Caddy in the sixties in the north of Scotland. The loving presence of many Nature spirits - and sometimes of the shy god Pan himself - are said by members of the community to account for the spectacular lushness and fertility of this intentional community, set as it is in the midst of a barren and windswept region on the northern seacoast of Scotland where, ordinarily, only gorse and scrub pine grow naturally. Having visited there for a few days about five years ago, I am inclined to believe the story.

 

Reflecting on Pan as the god of nature, a powerful being whose presence when benign can confer such blessedness on an entire region and its dwellers, yet the intensity of whose fear of a direct encounter with mortals is so great as to occasion ear-shattering screams of total panic, I am saddened by my awareness of what we seem to have done as a society to kill off the natural responses of children to the experience of learning. substituting for their unforced curiosity and natural fascination with the new or the unknown a sense of dread of some undefined, impending doom as real as the naked sword suspended by a single thread which Damocles, the tyrant of ancient Syracuse, had hung above his head, at his assigned place at a banquet, of a courtier who had criticized him. It has been said that if we tried to teach small children to walk in the same way we try to teach them to read, very few would ever manage it, and most would spend their lives in wheelchairs!

 

We forget that we human beings - like Pan - are part of nature. We teach children to deny their own care-free spontaneity, their own natural creativity as part of the seamless web of life - to deny what I would call their souls. Or, their daimon, as Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul) calls it - and what Kabir, the medieval Persian poet calls the "small ruby that everyone wants," which he says "has fallen out on the road."

 

We take for granted the necessity of the artificial restrictions we impose upon children throughout the period of their maximum susceptibility to disconfirmation as natural beings. We even teach them to redefine and rechannel their natural panic reactions to being thus disconfirmed as evidence that they are somehow at fault for panicking. We teach them to blame themselves for feeling weird at being thus regulated from the process, thus doubling the pressure on them to give in! And they do! It's a wonder to me that twelve years of this systematic process of stealing the souls of our children hasn't resulted in mass psychosis! As it is, to me it's small wonder that so many adults are virtually incapable of authenticity or spontaneity in their lives - whether in families or at work.

 

-- Journal of Family Life,.....

Fall, 1994.

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