One of the best pandemic purchases we ever made was our Shark robot vacuum (affectionately known as Umizoomi, Umi for short). Having never experienced a machine like this, we particularly enjoy watching how his sensors work. The manual said we could program him to map the rooms for efficient cleaning, but our house is small enough that we never chose to invest the time. We just hit the clean button and watch him randomly bounce around until the room is free of grit. Sometimes I will be typing on my laptop while in the living room recliner and hear him struggle to get over the floor transition from the kitchen to the dining room. He often gets stuck there and will run his toothed wheels in futility. The obnoxious sound he makes is like a refrigerator that is trying to pulverize crushed ice for a cocktail, a repetitive chipping and grinding noise that is incredibly grating on the ear. At that point you have two options, rescue and redirect him or wait for him to figure it out on his own. At first, we did not realize he actually had the capacity to liberate himself from obstacles and tight places; we would just yank him up. We had to learn a tolerance for his robot nature by observing him over time and watching him get himself unstuck after literally banging his head against the wall. There are occasions where he truly is run aground by cruising over a stack of papers and then, and only then, will he emit a unique distress call and light up red.
When he needs to recharge I hit the ‘dock’ button and he senses the station’s signal no matter where he’s at. Unfortunately, he often discovers that there are couches or chairs in the way of his destination and he gets very confused. Despite being 15 feet from where he wants to land, he starts to take these bizarre, circuitous routes. From my perspective, they make absolutely no sense. Why would you go backwards when your goal is forward? Why would you end up in an entirely different room moving toward the things in your way over and over? And yet when I actually leave him alone, he does eventually find his home.
Paradoxically, our non-human resident, Umizoomi, teaches us quite a human lesson on how to take the long view when people (including ourselves) appear ‘stuck’. We so often want to swoop in and rescue using our solution when we see the same mistakes being made time and again. What opportunities do we snatch from them and us when we constantly insert ourselves into an uninvited conversation? There are certainly times when stepping in does allow for a constructive conversation, but we often we misread when there are signs of a challenge or problem to be solved and not actually of distress.
Through listening to the pain of my friends and attending to my own unaddressed hurts, I have been reflecting on and looping back to this theme of walking alongside people when you are tempted to cut to the chase with advice or dismissal. I am convinced that the way we can tell a hurdle from an S.O.S. (especially with our children) is by observing enough to discern the difference and checking in if we’re unsure. We give appropriate room for them to grow (which may involve our help if we demonstrate trust), but not without a safe place to land if needed that will still affirm their worth.
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