Diamonds or Water? Which do you value more?
It is strange that water is cheap and a diamond is expensive. After all, water is necessary to survival and extremely useful while diamonds are rare and have little use at all.
This question was first asked by Aristotle in 384 BC.
“Why should diamonds be priced so high and water be priced so low even when water is essential to sustain life while diamonds are not?.”
This paradox will help me answer my question
Why is what I do of great worth/value to children in school today?
Diamonds are high-priced because the demand is high relative to the limited quantity available. Water is inexpensive because it is typically fairly abundant, but if one is dying of thirst, then it would have a much higher value-in-exchange--conceivably even greater than diamonds.
My question. Why is what I do of great worth/value to school children.
First - What do I do?
- I am a Polynesian cultural performing artist and on the surface I jump around dancing to music have fun and tell stories to children. Cool job right.
However, below the surface I use different cultural dance, song and stories to connect children and adults to core values and life guiding principles in a one hour show. I focus on why we need challenges, and how they are healthy & necessary (E.G. You are not drowning - you are learning to swim.) Making strong connections is vital - to ancestors, family, friends, culture & to the earth - this connection helps with identity and where you fit in.
I believe that core values and life guiding principles are like the water and they are essential to sustain life, they are the social glue to society which were typically fairly abundant in the olden days, but today people ( children ) are dying of thirst, not of water but of this social glue, these core values (A core value is a guiding belief or attitude that will run your life for you. We all have values, and they underpin and direct our lives).
Am I an expert? Well I can say that I have had 20 years of performing and perfecting my craft with children in Australia & New Zealand, and in the process I have grown, been educated and enlightened . I know what children need!
Getting an education at school is like the diamond it is very valuable and needed but that diamond is off little use if the child has no self-worth, identity and connection.
This is what "Mana" is all about. Mana means many things in Polynesia and one of them is "unseen power."
My show has power. I can see it through the children's eyes while Im dancing and interacting with them. They smile, laugh, explode and sometimes even cry with emotion. I can feel their excitement and exuberance in the room and it lights me up, but most of all I can tell that the children GET IT! - self-worth - believe in them-selfs and connect when they come up to me after the performance and give me down to earth, raw, authentic feedback.
Read my next blog, it will be the feedback I have been given for the last 20 years.
NZ Feedback 2016
It was a beautiful sunny but fresh day in August. I finished preforming at a primary school on the South Island of New Zealand in a Town called Timaru. I performed two shows for 500 children, 250 in each show. On the 2nd show I had the year 4,5, & 6 grades. I said goodbye to the kids and they were all filing out of the hall when my eye caught a Tongan boy letting everyone go pass. Everyone had just about left the hall except three girls that were talking to me and this young boy. I could tell that he wanted to talk to me on his own but he couldn't wait for the girls to leave, so he walked up to me, and before he got to me he starts to cry and through his tears he spurts out "Thank you that meant a lot to me" I put my arm on his shoulder to comfort him and by this time the three girls that were standing there started to cry. I don't know what part of the performance affected him to cause this emotion but it was powerful enough for him (a 11-12 year old boy) to share that with me through his tears.
This is only one reason why what I do is of great worth.