Month: October 2023

I live in Iowa, home of the early caucus, so the airwaves and mailboxes are inundated with candidate messages vying for support. I used to be annoyed with them but I have reframed my listening to see who can come up with the most outlandish promise. In the running: increase the number of doctors by ten-fold and eliminate medical deserts, provide all primary care for free, institute term limits for Congress, and hold college tuition dollars for five years to verify that the graduate has a job before the school is paid.

You may like some of these ideas but the reality is that they are almost certain not to happen. The candidates skip over the pesky little notion that the President doesn’t get to enact such things unilaterally and that others may have a hand in determining policy or figuring out how to pay for it.

It’s true in government and in all forms of leadership. The person at the top can obviously set the tone but they don’t have a magic wand to do whatever they’d like. Not only are there external rules to follow but internal support to garner and compromises to be struck. Any leader will tell you that only a fraction of what they’d like to do is actually able to be done.

As you listen to stump speeches, pitches in your boardroom, and promises by your kids about who will take care of that dog, be sure to hear it through the filter of reality. It’s a lot easier to think big than to deliver it.

An occupational therapist recognized that her young patients only saw handwriting in an academic context. They had to handwrite things for homework or in school but they didn’t see it in any other place. Not on checks, not in the daily mail, not in lists on the refrigerator, or in notes left for them — handwriting was not part of things that brought them joy.

So, she took it upon herself to handwrite letters to all 84 of the students in those four classes, grades 1-3. She wanted them to learn to associate handwriting with something besides school. She even promised to write them back if they wrote her.

“My overall goal with this entire project is to create a reason for writing to be authentic and delightful and completely optional and also adult-modeled. To model why someone (me) might write something for joy and delight and not at all because they’re academically required to,” she said.

As someone who handwrites a lot, her project brought me joy to see that someone would make the effort to help children experience the pleasure of receiving mail. But beyond that, kudos to her for taking action on something she thought was important.

Maybe handwriting isn’t your passion and writing 84 notes isn’t your thing. Fine. Follow her lead and figure out what is, then do something about it. We too often lament, too rarely act.

Source: The Ocuplaytional Therapist