I Say a Little Prayer

I say a little prayer

Each time I start a new fairy tale class I find myself looking out at a room of open and eager faces. Almost everyone who comes is hoping to find some of the magic they once had in those stories. They bring me their trust and I whisper to myself: Please don't let me ruin their childhood.

Our earliest memories have great power. They have a lasting effect on who we are and how we face life. We attach meaning to whatever we experience and that meaning is at the heart of their strength and potency.

For most of us fairy tales are part of our childhood fabric. We heard them or read them or saw them on the big screen. We absorbed them unfiltered, with all the innocence and purity that only those magic years contained. We received an imprint of certain ideas and images that stay with us throughout our life. Even when we can't remember the whole story, or we overlap one fairy tale with another there is a core set of emotions that underlie our future adult lives.

I call the class I teach “The Fairy Tale Experience” because experience is the central piece of what I’m after. It is one of those funny words for which there is no obvious synonym. But if you delve into its meaning you'll discover that it means that something has made a change. That an experience can only exist if we have been affected by an event. We have to be fully present to it in a way that we generally aren't in ordinary life. Our lives are full of events that have no effect on us. We go through our days in a constant state of mild distraction and don't or can't make a connection with what we encounter. But children live in the moment and almost everything that happens to them has meaning because they are fully alive to it all.

Real experience, the kind I'm talking about, requires more of us. Something has to happen. We have to undergo something. We have to see or feel or participate in it so that we are changed. Real experience leaves a real impression on us.

It is those childhood impressions that I am trying to protect. They are precious and pure, and unfortunately they are also static and incomplete. They are enshrined in our young hearts and minds and have brought a great deal to our psychic lives. But they haven't grown or changed. They are understandably undeveloped.

The question I bring to the class is whether there is something in fairy tales that can be experienced anew. Is there more gold to be mined and brought to the surface of our lives? Do these stories have anything more to say to us after a lifetime of living?

Because I have always been under the spell of fairy tales they are still living, breathing entities in my life. I talk about them endlessly and I'm finding surprises almost every time I re-engage with them.

These surprises happen most often in class. I ask a lot of “What” questions: What happens next? What about this...? What could this mean? What do you think? and the class comes alive with answers.

The responses are very personal and they come from each student’s unique feelings and memories, their own very specific experience. There are some brilliant insights sometimes and almost always there will be some new way to think about the story. I treasure those.

But more importantly, sometimes there will be a clunker idea, one where everyone in the room goes silent. The idea may be too far out for some or way off the mark for others, but then we take the time and dig. “Say more,” I say, and the student will make a very real effort to uncover the meanings behind their answer. This is the point of my concern. Can I encourage them to open themselves up, to delve into just what created the ideas and emotions behind their answer? Can I do that without causing harm? It’s not easy to examine our selves this way. It’s really heroic in a fairy tale way, to follow a magical helper’s directions (in this case, mine) and trust that it’s all for the best.

For me, the room gets bigger when this happens. My world and how I understand it is changed because now I have a new perspective I never had before.

But in everyday life, we don't examine ourselves very much. We don’t look at our ideas or opinions in any real way. Or anyone else’s either. We limit our response to the very minimal. Did I like it or not? We press the little Heart or the Like button rather than take a moment to give it any more thought. But what would it be like if we really grappled with the ideas behind our emotions, the things that generated our opinions and our worldviews? What would we see if we understood the Why that underlines our inner life.

That's what I try to do in these classes. Because I have learned so much from fairy tales I want to help others do the same; and in doing that I gain something new every time. But it’s their gain that concerns me.

Of course, I worry. I don't want to push anyone in such a way as to distort or even disrupt those precious memories. What I want is for all of us to bring together our childhood knowledge gleaned from innocence with our grown up and hard earned world of experience. We deserve to have both.

Even now, as I'm about to send this off into the ether, to far-flung friends and complete strangers, written for people I may never meet, I still say a little prayer: Please don't let me ruin your childhood.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash