bears

In the past week, I have watched the same episode of "Bear in the Big Blue House" five times. I am sure I will watch it again on Thursday. The 2-year-old boy I babysit sits enthralled on the couch while Bear plays with his friends Ojo, Tree-lo, Shadow, Luna, the Otters, and the mouse Tuttle (my favorite because he's so frenetic and always worked up about something). I find Bear and company far less creepy than the Wiggles, adult men who wear a rainbow spectrum of turtlenecks and dance awkwardly and seem not to realize that they are, in fact, adults.

The central conflict of this episode is that Bear can't find Tree-lo to explain what fall is about. He finally finds him at the end trying to glue the leaves back on the trees to "fix" them (assist goes to the purple otters) and explains that the trees are okay, that the leaves are supposed to fall off to make room for new leaves come spring. Tree-lo, satisfied with this new information, joyously exclaims that the trees are okay and that he loves spring, and Bear retreats to go sing a song with the moon.

I am nostalgic for the days when knowledge was a panacea for troubles of any kind, when any problem could be remedied by information handed down to me by an adult, which I accepted as the gospel truth simply because an adult said it. Note: this didn't even have to be a legal adult, simply someone who seemed old enough to know what they're talking about, for instance, the average twelve-year-old.

Now, I am one of those "adults," and while I thought I would have all the answers by now by virtue of having a college degree, I am left with more questions than ever. So many times, I'm even one step behind that, not even knowing what the question is. There's a sense of unsettled uncertainty, but I can't even formulate it into words. In a world where encyclopedic amounts of knowledge are accessible through a simple google search, there is no solution for those who don't even know what they don't know. You can't google "I'm confused" and expect an explanation or type in "Where should I go" to mapquest and find step-by-step directions from your driveway to your future.

If, however, you were tempted and did google "I'm confused," this is the first image that would pop up.

From one of my favorite books:


"When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and its time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you dont even know from which direction the sun rises anymore." – Elizabeth Gilbert