I spent much of my childhood in a small rural community just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.
My father was an avid and prolific organic gardener, who also wrote for Mother Earth News, and Organic Gardening magazines.
There was a point in time where a local farmer and my father were enjoying a conversation about traditional farming vs. organic methods. The farmer shared the following story with my Dad…
The farmer explained that he was a corn farmer and that things had been rough for his family. One autumn he had taken his family to purchase a pumpkin and some Indian corn for decorations during the Halloween and Thanksgiving holidays. While at the little roadside stand, the farmer began making a mental note of how much money was exchanging hands for each of the Indian Corn ears.
After returning home with their goods, the farmer did a little more thinking… and calculating.
He decided to try to partake of the windfall profits that the harvest decoration suppliers were raking in (compared to the price of a bushel of corn).
He and his family determined to take a very small portion of their land and put it into Indian Corn.
To his great surprise and amazement, his neighboring corn farmers scorned and ridiculed him for dabbling in such things!
He had the last laugh though, on his way to Hawaii with his family for a vacation. One that was well deserved and long overdue, AND wouldn’t have been possible without the crazy Indian corn field.
Even after the farmer's great success with the Indian corn, the nay-sayers still scoffed at him.
Of course, if EVERY farmer in same vicinity decided to grow the Indian corn, I don’t know if there would have been a large enough market to accommodate a handsome profit to all, but why should the others hold the innovative farmer in
such disregard.
The farmer had demonstrated courage to try something new, to take a (calculated) risk--one that would not harm his regular operation at all--and accepted the chiding by his neighbors--while on the way to the bank.
My father often referred to this little conversation, and I think that it helped him become a greater risk taker. In later years he was more likely to trust his own hunches and judgments and disregard the opinions of nay-sayers.
A case in point--at a charity yard auction my father spied a decorative metal bowl with some odd writing on it. He brought it over to me and asked my opinion of it. I thought that if it hadn’t had the strange writing on it, it would have been more appealing. I suggested that he put it back.
(This was not an “auction” in the ordinary sense, one would go up an down aisles and rows of bins and place items they were considering in a cardboard box. When you had what you were interested in, you would take it to the cashiers for a “price”--sometimes they would dicker with you, and sometimes they would stand firm in their price.)
My father did put it back as I had suggested, but went right back to it and brought it to me again. He insisted that I take a second look at it--he felt it might be real solid silver. At that, I took a second look, and said, perhaps it was, but no one would want it with all that crazy writing on it, and it was only suitable for scrap. He put the bowl back--again.
I was surprised when my father returned to tell me he had purchased his whole box of items, including that silly bowl, for about $5.00. He said we wouldn’t be out anything if it was “nothing”, but he really had a feeling about it.
By this time, I had sort of had a change of heart about the bowl. I really began to study it. It had a decorative chased rim--which I later discovered through a little research was called “niello”--which had real gold on it. The strange writing I at first thought was possibly Hebrew,though I found a Jewish friend who ruled that out, but he couldn’t place the language either. Then we thought perhaps it was Arabic. It didn’t seem to be that either. We put it out for sale at $50 the very first day, before we even had had time to research it. One woman who had asked about it was shocked and horrified that we were asking such an unseemly price and "hmmpphhed" at us and stormed off as if we had insulted her intelligence by asking such a price.
The item seemed to be attracting a lot of attention, from other dealers, as well as customers, much more so than other decorative bowls we had sold.
I was frankly a little put out with the haughty woman who refused to pay $50 for a solid silver decorative bowl.
I decided to hang on to it and really do some research on it. The internet was not quite so available at that time, so I had to do my research through books and other friends who might help.
I never could discover the language on the bowl--the eventual buyer of it agreed to tell me after I delivered the bowl to his upscale antique shop. He paid quite a goodly sum to us--in the hundreds of dollars--and disclosed the reason we couldn’t identify the language was that it was a form of Sanskrit!
We don’t know what he ended up selling the bowl for--but we made a very nice increase on our investment…and we imagine he did too!
So what does this have to do with parenting?
Teach your children to think for themselves and not be guided by others limited thought. There are many ways to demonstrate this…a piece of paper becomes an airplane that can fly across the room, or a fan, or a snowflake…
What else can I do with this? What things are other people doing that I might take advantage of? What things are going on that others are missing? Pay attention…there are many things happening all around us everyday that we choose to ignore, and sometimes, wrongfully, belittle.
Recommended Reading: My Side of the Mountain
author: Jean Craighead George
Still one of my all time favorite books. It also became one of my son's favorite books.
I read it every summer as a kid.
A young boy runs away to live in the wilds of his ancestral family home in the mountains...builds an unusual house, provides his own food, and adopts an interesting "pet". The background "nature" info is great! The author has a website with a video describing the book and how she came to write the book.
