Surviving the game
What started off as a fun family geocaching outing ended with my oldest boy and me hunting my youngest down like Gary Busey and a host of B-movie baddies hunted down Ice T in the '90s camp classic, Surviving the Game.
My two boys, now twelve and (almost) nine, have been taking piano lessons for several years, and they’ve gotten good. The younger one even dabbles at composing, and when he stands at the piano improvising songs, it reminds me of Jerry Lee Lewis.
Through piano lessons, we’ve developed an affinity for classical music. I can’t name most of the pieces and couldn’t tell you the difference between a concerto and a symphony. Still, I enjoy listening to the classical music station now, especially when they play scores from popular movies like Harry Potter and Star Wars.
Recently, we decided to take our appreciation for classical music to the next level and hear the Minnesota Orchestra perform music by our favorite composer, Mozart. They have a deal where kids get in free with a paying adult if you sit in the front row, which meant we’d be up close and personal with my man Wolfgang.
The conductor was also a virtuoso violinist who somehow managed to conduct and play simultaneously; it was wyld. My oldest and I were transfixed, but my youngest was bored out of his mind. I couldn’t blame him, as it’s a lot to ask an eight-year-old to sit still for two hours, especially when the booming bass section is a mere two canoe rods in front of your face.
Still, he held it together admirably, and I was so impressed that I told him he could choose the next morning’s activity. I figured he’d go with brunch at IHOP—objectively the best value in casual chain breakfast dining in our market—but instead he went with geocaching, our family’s third-favorite pastime behind Uno and touchdown dancing.
Geocaching, for the uninitiated, is an outdoor scavenger hunt for the COVID generation. Using a smartphone app, you navigate to GPS coordinates and hunt for hidden caches—small containers with logbooks tucked into tree hollows, under picnic tables, or in other clever public nooks. When we geocache, we usually pick an area with several caches close together for maximum payoff. We don’t always find them all, but we’ve never been completely skunked.
At least, not until this last time.
We chose a sprawling urban park with a nature trail, soccer fields, a splash pad, a meadow, playgrounds, woods, and a couple of ponds—and four promising caches. Unfortunately, our hunt ended before it really began.
My youngest had spent a lot of time carefully planning the route. He was proud of his map, and when his older brother and I wanted to give up on the first cache after twelve minutes of fruitless bushwhacking, he wasn’t having it. I can’t even tell you how we went from having family fun playing a silly scavenger game to a full-blown meltdown in under seven seconds, but somehow we did. In those moments, not even the dulcet tones of a Mozart sonata could have calmed the tempest raging within my youngest son’s soul.
My youngest, bless his heart, is an emotional human being prone to mega meltdowns when things don’t go his way. When he’s losing it, he gets stuck in his feelings, and it’s hard for him to snap out of it.
I’ve learned that sometimes the kindest thing I can do is not try to fix or explain, but simply let him have his feelings. So when he stormed off, I didn’t force him to get it together and rejoin us like I might’ve done in my old parenting days. Now that I’m an enlightened parent, I let him book it.
The problem was that he booked it harder than the library.
He kept running like Forrest Gump across the park until he disappeared from view. Letting my eight-year-old out of my sight at an urban park was out of the question, especially since many serve as encampments for unhoused folks on hard drugs. I turned to my oldest, and with one look, we knew what we had to do: we had to hunt his brother down.
We weren’t sure which direction he’d gone, so we split up. Within a minute, my oldest called out—he’d spotted his brother, already past the ponds and heading for the park’s edge. I caught sight of him too, just as he saw us and changed course toward the woods. I shouted to my oldest to circle the far side of the pond while I cut across, and in that moment it felt like a real-life version of Surviving the Game, the unapologetic B-movie from the early 90s where Gary Busey and a gang of borderline B-listers hunt Ice-T, who plays an unhoused man lured to the remote wilderness under false pretenses.
The absurdity of the situation made me laugh out loud, which didn’t help the cramp that had developed in my side from chasing after my boy, who was really moving.
Fortunately, we cornered him before he escaped into the woods and beyond. We had to physically bring him to the ground, and had we not, I think he’d be halfway to Canada by now. While part of me worried neighbors might call the cops on me for tackling a small child, another part admired his unbreakable spirit. He’s got Captain America-level tenacity, and I plan to help him learn to harness it for good.
His refusal to stay down was comical, and even as my gimpy knees barked in protest, I couldn’t stop smiling. Not long ago, I would’ve been yelling, angry, and overwhelmed. Instead, I found myself laughing at the grumpy trooper version of myself. My youngest didn’t join in, but eventually he cooled off enough for us to call it a day and head home.
That episode reminded me that while I can be “enlightened” all I want, sometimes my kids are going to go buckwyld, and there’s nothing I can do about it. In this regard, parenting reminds me of that game called life.
When things go sideways and are out of our control, we can manage negativity by consciously choosing to be cheerful.
We can practice cheerfulness by consciously smiling, which functions like spiritual regenerative braking by converting negative energy into positivity.
Consciously smiling sends a vibrational signal to the brain that all is well. In response, the brain emits calming vibrations that ripple through the body, quieting the lower-mind stress reaction. This creates a positive feedback loop, releasing massive amounts of low-vibrating negativity and clearing space for high-vibrating Presence. A tiny smile, like the Mona Lisa, is all it takes.
Modern physicists call vibrational exchanges like these “quantum events,” while ancient spiritualists recognized them as expressions of soul power. Yogis, for instance, have understood the importance of a pleasant countenance for millennia, which is why the Buddha is always smiling.
Just like my youngest isn’t quite ready for Orchestra Hall, his brain’s not yet wired for that level of self-regulation. While my oldest and I are planning another trip to hear Beethoven, I won’t make my lil guy attend.
But if he flashes me just one of his beautiful smiles that could melt a gremlin’s heart, I’ll take him to IHOP for brunch and let him order a rooty tooty fresh ‘n’ fruity combo of his choice.
