Austin accompanied a small group of students to complete a demonstration and teach a Tae Kwon Do class to a local summer camp on Friday.
On Saturday morning, Mister Cooper, his instructor, approached Keith:
“I gotta tell you something. Yesterday, I was approached by a woman at the camp that Austin was helping at and she complimented me on the maturity of my students and how great they were – and they were. They were awesome. By the end, every kid was bowing, saying thank you in Korean, and they each broke a board. It was awesome. – So anyway, she was complimenting me on the students and she pointed at Austin and asks for his name, and I tell her, ‘That’s Austin,’ and she tells me how great he was working with a boy there who was autistic and how he was so empathetic. At one point, the boy started to get frustrated and she was going to step in and help and Austin held up his hand to ask her to stay back and said, ‘It’s okay, I’ve got it ma’am.’ And not only did the boy not shutdown, but he learned how to do it. She was so impressed with Austin’s ability to be kind and patient, and to empathize.”
Austin was sitting next to Keith; he said that he didn’t even know that the boy was autistic, he only recognized that he needed to be more patient, because the boy seemed to need more time to learn.
Keith asked Austin, “What do you think that your experience teaches you?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. (He really wasn’t)
“Do you think that autism might be a pretty involved disorder?”
I guess so.
With all that complexity, do you think that there are lots of books and classes out there that might have been published or taught to instruct teachers, parents, and other community members how to engage and interact with people with autism?
Probably.
Have you read any of those books? Taken any of those classes?
No.
So how were you able to succeed?
I don’t know. I just tried to be kind.
And that is what I hope you remember, dude. You have no idea what it must be like to live as someone with autism. Or what is like to be a person of color. Or to be much older. Or of a different gender. Or from another country. You can’t know what it is like to be in their shoes, but you will always know how to be with them. What do we do?
Be kind?
And?
Patient?
Exactly. If you can find a space to be kind and patient with people – even those you don’t necessarily understand – then you have a chance to have a positive impact, whether you are teaching them how to break a board, if I’m teaching someone how to walk, or your mother is teaching them how to crawl or stand. The first thing – above all else – just remember to be kind.
That’s easy to remember, Daddy.