Insight To Chaos

There was a kid in my fourth-grade class who completely flipped out one day. Like running, screaming, desk-flipping, tree branch wielding crazy. As things like this go, nobody saw it coming or knew how to respond to the madness during or afterward.

I remember it was during a free hour where we were all working on different things and our teacher was going around the class for one-on-one help. Naturally, the classroom was noisy – a sort of contained din of unruly chatter. Then, out of nowhere, this kid started yelling. He stood up and flipped his desk over. Took the bottom foot from a chair leg and threw it at the window. The teacher tried to approach him to calm him down and he cleared the teacher’s desk. Then he grabbed the fire extinguisher and bolted outside. We were all told to stay in our seats as our teacher followed after him, and I think one of us called down to the office to alert them to what was happening. We were all, of course, as obedient as any group of confused 9-year-olds would be without an adult, so we stood up and inched closer to the windows to watch what was happening outside. From my vantage point I could see this kid emptying the fire extinguisher in every direction he could to keep a safe distance from the now three adults trying to approach and subdue him. When the extinguisher was empty, he threw it and ran. The next time he appeared through our windows he was running the other direction, wielding a small tree branch. He disappeared from sight completely, then so did everyone pursuing him. Then nothing.

Imagine thirty 9-year-olds sitting quietly in an unattended classroom, anxious over what might come next. Eerie.

I’m not sure how much time passed between everyone disappearing from our view and our teacher returning to check on us. When he did, he informed us that this kid had been stopped and was being dealt with in the Principle’s office. Just a little while after that, the Principal came into our classroom. Together with my teacher, they tried to explain to all of us what exactly had happened…and why.

We were told to imagine a busy, noise filled place. So noisy that we couldn’t hear our own thoughts and so busy that we couldn’t move from the spot where we stood. Then, we were asked to take all that chaos around us and spin it around us as fast as possible – just like those first few moments after getting off a merry-go-round where your body’s still but your eyes are still circling. Once it was clear that everybody was imagining the same thing, our teacher asked us to take all of that scary, dizzying mess and stick it in our heads, right on top of all of our thoughts. The Principal asked how all of that made us feel: Scared. Crazy. Sad. Dumb. Lost. Angry. Confused.

Our Principal told us that everything we had just imagined and described was exactly what happened with our classmate just a little while before. She told us nobody could be blamed, but that this young man was extra sensitive to the busy noise stuff and our free hour overwhelmed him. She said he was very sorry for causing so much trouble, but more so he was scared. She asked us all to remember what it felt like in our imaginations and then she asked that we go easy on him when he returned to class.

We did.

To this day, whenever I – or somebody I care about – start feeling especially overwhelmed by a situation or place, I think back to that day. What it must have been like for that little boy with all of that chaos in his head, flailing about in fright. The image of him running around with extinguishers and branches is still so clear in my memory. And the Principal’s spinning, noisy chaos example – I definitely get it. I think what has always struck me most though, and perhaps what keeps the correlation constant today, was/is the appeal for compassion – for our classmate as well as for ourselves.

The truth is we all have times where we get a little bat shit crazy.

I think the trick is, whether we’re the ones watching or wielding branches, to always try to remember: when the dust settles, try to go easy on each other.