How to re/learn

When is the last time you relearned something? I don't mean going through the steps of a previously accomplished task or goal. Relearning has a negative connotation because it implies deficiency. We wouldn't have to relearn something unless we forgot how to do it in the fist place, right?

But what if relearning became re/learning and not just a rehashing of an old routine or practice, but an entire overhaul of a former thought process? Can we even do this? Is it possible to look at something we are familiar with and examine it without all the baggage that accompanies our beliefs and presuppositions? I thought I might try to get a different perspective on homelessness, but I am the first to admit the mere nature of my job disallows me to be as objective as I would like to be.

Children have a unique way of blending bluntness and honesty with empathy and sincerity. Perhaps the most beneficial way to go about this re/learning process might be to talk to a child. My son (who is 9) came to work with me today because it is MLK Day and he didn't have to go to school. I asked him some questions about what it meant to be homeless and the connotations that accompanied this issue. And you know what... his answers were almost identical to what any adult might have said. He had bested my investigative journalistic tendencies by not really telling me anything that surprised me. I felt a little defeated because my experiment had failed.

Shortly after our chat in my office, we meandered down the hall and into the dining area to put on some hot water so the residents could have coffee. This is a daily task for me so I fade into autopilot as soon as I begin this task, but my son was experiencing it with a keen awareness that I had abandoned months ago. What caught his eye and impacted him the most was the young girl, roughly his own age who was living at the shelter. Forget any lame attempt at an interview, I was re/learning by watching my son. He was shocked to see her it rattled him because (what he told me in our interview) he imagined homeless people were older and senior citizens.

Not this one. She was exactly like him.

And this is such an overstated mantra of nonprofit workers everywhere. We champion and sing it like its the national anthem or at least a really cool Radiohead song. "The homeless are just like us, only they've been dealt different circumstances." But do we believe this? Is there sometimes just a smidgen of patronization or self-righteousness that creeps in when we try to help them?
Do we have the ability to recognize the homeless as individuals and not statistics? Is their life so much different from ours?

How sad that it takes a 9 year old to teach me things I used to know.