mondrian
With Luke, it isn’t so much what he loves as how he loves it. I’m realizing this lately. Actually, I think it’s something we’ve realized for a while, but with him getting older, and his approach to his interests maturing accordingly, it’s brought the realization into sharper focus.
What I mean by my initial statement is this: The common thread that ties Luke’s passions together isn’t necessarily what an outsider would think it would be, on first glance. For example, he’s interested in the planets, and by extension space, so logically, one would assume he’d have at least some interest in, say, astronauts or spacecraft or rockets or things like that, right? And it’s not to say doesn’t—he does, to a degree—but in our observation, he’s far more interested in aspects of his space interest that he can organize and systematize in his mind. That process of organization and systematization is the modus operandi that ties his interests together, as opposed to elements more intrinsic to the interests themselves. Again, it’s more how that what.
I can relate. With me, the appeal of airplanes, at least in my early years, wasn’t first and foremost things you might expect: the speed, or the flying (though those things were present)—it was the aesthetics. It was the way the airplanes looked that drew me, and that aesthetic fascination was part of the reason I connected interests as seemingly disparate as, say, aircraft and whales. They both had the streamlined, teardrop shape that I was after. Another way of putting it is there was as much of me as there was of the interest itself in whatever I was into. The interest and I “met in the middle,” so to speak.
Same goes for Luke. Focusing on his how instead of the what explains the connection between the geography interest, the astronomy interest and the way he systematizes information about each of his friends and family members, among other things. It helps explain his conversational style, and part of why he has such a hard time with discipline—the overarching “grid” of behavior and consequence is really hard for his mind to grasp. Every situation is a little different from the last, and that difference throws him off the track completely.
I want to use that knowledge of him going forward. I want to introduce new interests, or reintroduce older ones that have “glanced off,” into his rubric of how, rather than presenting them conventionally. Hopefully, it’ll help flesh out the number of subjects he can relate to, and create jumping-off points for deeper topics of discussion.