About Crows and other Things

Today was stake conference and in yet another setting in the LDS church I heard the following John Ciardi Poem.

ABOUT CROWS

by John Ciardi

The old crow is getting slow;

the young crow is not.

Of what the young crow does not know,

the old crow knows a lot.

At knowing things, the old crow is still

the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know?

How to go faster.

The young crow flies above, below, and rings

around the slow old crow.

What does the fast young crow not know?

WHERE TO GO.

I was thinking that I'm going to be this old crow much longer than I was a young crow.  Now that I have a direction, at least through the end of my masters program, I need to make sure i'm using all my ability to get there.  Sometimes I can be distracted by things from facebook to hanging out to the possibility of getting a computer capable of playing games.  That's not to say distractions aren't always good, but one needs to surround themselves with the good kind of distractions such as indexing or playing music or wholesome fun of any sort. But that's off topic. 

Yogi Berra was said to have once said you can't go where you aren't going.  One thing i learned quickly after my mission was to talk to those old crows to get an idea as where to head for my college education since that would affect much of the rest of my life. I'm grateful for an handful of professors and others who guided me and were able to change my sense of success in life away from money and worldly things. 

I help run a drop-in for 11-14 year olds at a community center in East Belfast and at first I took my role as mostly just a facilitator, open the building set up the entertainment and food and let the kids go at it while supervising and making sure all was safe.  That view changed a bit after an incident last week and I came to the point where I realized that I need to form strong relationships with these kids.  As a responsible adult (horrid Idea I know) I can offer these kids views which will help them as they approach life.  I had a couple conversations which the kids involved in the incident and even though they were still a bit passionate and ticked about the issue we were able to come to an understanding where they could see the fallacy of their previous thinking and were able to step up on the building block provided them.

I shudder to think of myself as an old crow, but to these younguns being in my mid 20s makes me old.  I need to take advantage of this opportunity to share and teach but also to remember they have things they can teach also.