Cultivating Watchful Presence
There was a beautiful blog post I read years ago called “Children, Learning, and the Evaluative Gaze of School” by Carol Black. I’ve thought a lot about her term, the evaluative gaze ever since. I grew up under it, as many people in my generation did. The evaluative gaze was so entrenched in almost everything; it wasn’t until I became a parent to a small child who seemed almost instantly and visibly allergic to anything resembling our assessment, conditional approval, and evaluations that I could even start to pull on the thread that this gaze was a certain way of being, a choice, a way of showing up, rather than a given of human existence. I wonder if I will ever fully exist without the nagging presence of the evaluative gaze coming to knock at the door, but I have come to recognize it, and continue to learn how to observe it rather than react from it.
The evaluative gaze can be insidious and, in my experience, it might be one of the more direct routes away from unconditional love. I’m not saying this as an outsider, from some perfect paradigm of unconditional love, standing beyond the struggle and shaking my head at people falling short. I’m saying this as a mother–who, when I looked primarily through the evaluative lens, could easily stop beholding and acknowledging the entirety of the whole, multifaceted human before me. That lens could derail me quickly, focusing me on how my child was supposed to be, what he was supposed to excel at, and when he was supposed to do things according to the predetermined time table.
I work with lots of children and I wonder sometimes if a large part of the work of their generation will be to undo the narrative of evaluation and standards and the endless industries built around selling ways to fix those who aren’t measuring up. In the many hours I’ve spent teaching, I’ve found that the evaluative gaze almost immediately shuts something down. Yes, some children are more motivated by gold stars and winning than others, so they might participate more actively in work that is attached to some kind of measure from another, but it doesn’t ever make them wholehearted.
As I struggled to learn how to put the evaluative gaze aside, I realized that I needed a new lens, a different way of describing the kind of gaze I want to cultivate in my interactions with children as a teacher and a parent. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it’s not really a gaze at all. A gaze is a lot of pressure. What I want to be is Watchfully Present to the person I am with. I want to show up fully in that place and time with sturdiness, acceptance and space to hold the multitudes of what the child experiences and expresses. I want to be grounded and not easily knocked over by the changing tides. I want to be curious, rather than already having decided on all of the answers.
When I am showing up with Watchful Presence, I am paying close attention, listening, reflecting back to a child what I am seeing and hearing. My work isn’t to measure or remediate. I’m not there to hold the hallowed list of “what he should be doing” and push him towards that. Rather, I am there to provide mature attention, help set conditions for growth and healthy boundaries for the community, and most importantly to pay attention to each child’s unique constellation of attributes, gifts and tendernesses. When I show up beside others in this way, I notice that my stress is lower, the children are more open and curious, and the space for actual questioning and growth opens up.
There are many mirrors in nature for showing up with a Watchful Presence rather than an Evaluative Gaze, but one of my favorites is the Mother Tree. According to researcher Suzanne Simard, “Mother trees are large trees within a forest that act like centralized hubs supporting communication and nutrient exchange among trees.” Mother Trees do amazing things like gathering up water with their deep roots and sharing it with young saplings, recognizing distress in young trees and sharing nutrients, and infecting saplings with mycorrhizal fungi which embeds them in a protective underground network. I imagine a Mother Tree standing tall, firm, rooted, with a wise awareness of what is going on around her. She isn’t fretting and running in a million directions to create the most accomplished saplings. Rather, she watches over them, nourishes them, and tends to them with the things they actually need to grow.
References:
https://carolblack.org/the-gaze
https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/mother-trees-mothers day#:~:text=Amazing%20Things%20Mother%20Trees%20Do,elbow%20room%20for%20their%20%22kids%22
