Mystery, imagination and facts

I do love a fact. I love knowing the names of things: being able to recognise them again and give them meaning. Long contrails in a blue sky tell me the rain is coming; a May sky full of screaming tells me the swifts are back from Africa. It makes the world more familiar, more predictable: my safe little kingdom.

But facts are also the opposite of that. They make the world bigger. The vague green fuzz at the roadside resolves into detail and meaning: apple blossom imply cores tossed out of windows and unexpected roses suggest visiting finches, blackbirds or thrushes.

And then the detail and meaning unfurls into more questions: who threw the apple, was it did they hope it would grow, or just want to get rid of it? Did the bird have it's meal of rose hip in a garden or from a hedgerow? Does it nest in this same verge? Plenty to muse and wonder about now. It's as if the fact gives us a mental foothold in the fuzz - making it real enough to enter and explore.

We humans are prodigiously, thrillingly, ingenious, but still just creatures. Temporary ripples in evolution, here for a brief moment in the unrolling story of the universe. However much we enquire into the world, we can never understand Everything. Facts always come with a new little mystery or two in their arms. There's always more context, more relationship, more implications. The world is a bottomless lucky dip of things to know.

Isn't that great? We can utterly surrender to curiosity, seeking answers for ever and ever without any danger of running out of questions. And the world will still have plenty of mystery space for playing around with imagination.

Facts are the cake you can really have, and eat. And still leave room for madey-uppey dessert.

Another kind of outdoors

Online: we might spend much of our time there, but - particularly as parents - we complain that it is isolating and that it can lead to obesity, although this is equally true of spending all day reading books (which I did entirely uncriticised throughout my childhood). We say it leads to shortened concentration span, but does it? Perhaps our childhoods were boring enough to teach patience naturally. My son spends just as long building a castle in Minecraft as he does in Lego - longer, because he won't run out of the blocks he needs to extend it. 

We have done silly online quizzes as a family and ended up learning something new in the conversations they prompted. We race each other across a virtual moon on our separate mobile phones, shrieking and complaining about unfair tactics. All these activities are just as unifying as playing a board game which nobody means when they complain about 'gaming'.

The unacknowledged fear at the heart of anti-online parenting is that the confines of the home are no longer confines. A door as if to Narnia has opened up in your child's bedroom, and witches as well as fauns can come through. Anxiety about house-bound, nature-disconnected children bundles up nicely with this into a single mission to get your children off the computer and into the woods, where they can have a proper childhood making dens and mud pies and getting into the kind of trouble that calls for nurses and first aid, instead of police officers and therapy.

However, through that online door is a genuinely magical world. The world of ideas. A world of other people's minds which was previously only available to small groups of intellectuals living in particular times and places. The internet offers a kind of digital outdoors. Like the real outdoors it has discovery, wonder and danger all jumbled up together.

It's not safe for unattended children, so attend them: teach them digital bushcraft. But it's not a bad place just because it's not a safe place. Online is just like the real outdoors, except that you don't get physical exercise, or fresh air. So you might want to make sure they get into the woods too.