Personal Blogs

Do You Worry About the World Your Children Are Waking Up To?

 

I often meet a man who is rebuilding his life after addiction, carrying with him some of the weight of his past. He had often seen me taking old books into the charity shop, and one day he asked me, “Can you recommend a book for me?”

I thought for a moment and handed him My Life as a Dog.

I told him about Ingemar, the young Swedish boy at the heart of the story. His mother is seriously ill, and eventually he has to leave home and live with relatives. Suddenly, he is separated from the people, places and things he loves, without really understanding why any of it is happening.

Ingemar has an unusual way of coping with the things he cannot comprehend. He compares his own troubles with the lives of people and animals around him. He thinks about Laika, the famous dog sent into space, and somehow persuades himself that  his own situation is not quite as terrible as it might be. He uses imagination, humour and stories to make sense of pain that is simply too large for a child to face directly.

He makes mistakes. He gets into trouble. Sometimes he behaves badly. But beneath all of that is a frightened and lonely child, desperately searching for somewhere to belong.

That, I think, is what makes the book so special. It does not pretend that suffering is easy, nor does it suggest that sorrow simply disappears. Instead, Ingemar keeps going. He discovers small islands of friendship, kindness, laughter and hope. Slowly, he begins to understand that even when life takes things away from us, there can still be people who care, and there can still be reasons to carry on.

I told my new friend that the book was really about surviving hard things without losing the part of yourself that can still laugh, love and hope. It is simple, funny, sad and warm. Most importantly, it does not lecture you about how to live. It simply tells a story about a boy trying to find his way through a difficult world. That is why I thought of it for him.

As I walked away, though, my thoughts travelled much further back, to my own school days and the boy I once was.

I was a rough kid growing up on Clydeside, and, if truth be told, I seemed destined for trouble. I was not exactly showing early promise as a future Nobel Prize winner. Then one day a science teacher seemed to recognise something in us that perhaps we did not recognise in ourselves. Rather than trying to turn us into scholars, he taught us how to make fishing rods.

Fishing rods.

It sounds almost absurd when I say it now, but it changed my life.

He took us fishing and, without perhaps knowing the full extent of what he was doing, introduced us to another kind of life. A life where patience mattered. Where you could sit quietly beside a river and watch the water. Where the natural world could occupy your mind and, for a while, the troubles of the world could become wonderfully distant.

Every weekend, Sammy, Tom and I would set off fishing, far away from the Clydeside. I learned how to make lead floats using a potato mould. I learned to tie flies onto hooks. I learned the strange pleasure of simply being still.

Years later, I took my own daughter and her friend camping in Europe, and my son too. I suppose I was passing on something that had first been given to me by a teacher who understood that sometimes the best way to help a young person is not to tell them what they should become, but to open a door into another world.

And that brings me back to the man I met as I was going to the charity shop.

But what does fishing have to do with someone rebuilding his life after addiction?

More than we realise.

Sometimes a person does not need another lecture about the mistakes of the past. Sometimes they need an invitation into a different world.

If you love your children, take them into nature. Take them camping. Take them fishing. Teach them to identify butterflies, build a fire, watch birds, walk through a forest or simply sit beside a river and be quiet. Give them experiences that ask nothing of them except their presence.

Recently, I watched families with children and young people coming down from Scotland's West Highland Way. They were tired, their feet were sore, and they looked as though they had earned every blister. Yet there was something else in their faces. They looked renewed.

The natural world has a way of doing that.

When we step away from the noise, the screens, the pressures and the expectations, we remember something fundamental about ourselves. We remember that we belong to the earth, to one another, and to something larger than our immediate troubles.

And that is what my teacher gave us all those years ago. He gave a few rough boys a fishing rod, but what he really gave us was another possibility. He showed us that there was a world beyond the one we knew.

Sometimes, that is where hope begins.

There are people who help restore us. There are books that open doors. There are rivers that teach us to be still, friends who remind us that we matter, teachers who see possibilities in us before we see them ourselves, and small acts of kindness that quietly tell us there is still a place for us in this world.

And sometimes, God uses all of these things to lead us home.