The day he arrived, Blu, in his rambunctiousness, misjudged his first step and skidded down the steps on his stomach. No fun at all, especially because the edges of the granite were a little sharp, and at eight weeks old he was away from his mom for the first time.  And he was already exhausted.

For a long time after that he mistrusted almost every stair that he had to go down. More often than not, each step was studied then negotiated very purposefully. Unfortunately, this approach led to a couple of more minor mishaps, which only seemed to strengthen his opinion that he couldn’t be too careful with stairs. We knew he wasn’t generally fearful. He was already launching himself full-bore onto our much larger five-year-old Toller, just to incite a little fun and excitement.

One day Blu was racing back and forth across our refectory. Typically, he misjudged things a little, and ended up running up the long stairway. He looked around, and there he was at the top of the stairs. It sure looked like “OOPS!!” may have crossed his little face. With the next breath he headed back down almost as fast as he had come up.  And, of course, it was a successful descent. I wanted to pick him up and say, “There! See?  You can do stairs. Just stop thinking about it and trying so hard.”   

A quotation from Ray Bradbury, that I saw at the kid’s home-school open house last night put it perfectly: “Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It is self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”