The Hidden Curriculum of Bad Days
My twelve-year-old daughter had the day off school.
The teachers had a conference, which meant that while adults sat in a room discussing education, the children received a rare day of freedom.
What I did not realize at the time was that both of us were about to receive an education.
So we decided to drive to Germany.
My daughter wanted to go to Konstanz. Normally, I am not a great fan of Konstanz. It has become something of a shopping destination for Swiss people. Still, she wanted to go, so off we went.
The first sign that the day would not go according to plan appeared shortly after we arrived.
The shopping center was closed.
At first I noticed only one closed bakery.
Being a social worker who spends perhaps a little too much time thinking about economic decline and the peculiar direction Europe sometimes seems to be heading, I immediately developed a theory.
"Another bankruptcy," I announced confidently.
The bakery, I concluded, had become yet another casualty of the German economy.
Then we walked a little further.
Another shop was closed.
Then another.
Then another.
What followed was one of those awkward moments when reality begins systematically dismantling a perfectly good theory.
The problem was not bankruptcy.
The problem was that it was a public holiday.
Not a holiday throughout Germany, but one of those holidays that is taken very seriously in southern Germany while hardly anyone in my part of Switzerland pays attention to it.
My theory collapsed.
It would not be the last collapse of the day.
By now we were hungry.
We walked into a Lebanese restaurant. The staff seemed distracted. The prices were high. The menu was unfamiliar. Neither of us felt particularly comfortable.
Sometimes there is no dramatic reason.
A place simply does not feel right.
So we left.
At that point we did what we often do.
We chose Asian food.
My daughter is half Asian. I have spent more than a decade living in Asia. If we have no strong preference, we tend to gravitate in that direction.
Usually it works out.
This time it worked out somewhat less well.
We found a restaurant advertising a buffet at what appeared to be a very reasonable price.
The food was acceptable. Nothing extraordinary, but perfectly adequate.
Then the bill arrived.
It was considerably higher than I expected.
I pointed to the buffet price.
The waiter politely explained that the advertised price did not apply on public holidays.
Today there was a surcharge.
Fair enough.
I had missed that detail.
Then came the second surprise.
I asked to pay by card.
The waiter informed me that the card machine was not working.
Today.
Of all days.
Now, anyone who spends time in Germany knows that card payments occasionally occupy a strange territory somewhere between technology and philosophy. Whether the machine was genuinely broken or simply enjoying the holiday spirit itself, I cannot say.
What I can say is that I suddenly found myself walking to a cash machine, paying additional fees, and feeling mildly irritated.
When I returned, my daughter looked at me and laughed.
"How can this happen to you?"
From her perspective, I am somewhere between a social worker, a traveler, and Indiana Jones.
I have lived on several continents.
I have crossed Africa overland.
I have gotten myself into situations far more complicated than an overpriced all-you-can-eat buffet in southern Germany.
And yet here I was, defeated by a public holiday and a cash machine.
I thought about it for a moment and then gave her the only honest answer.
"Because I let my guard down."
Not in the sense of danger.
In the sense of attention.
I had stopped looking closely at reality and started operating on assumptions.
I assumed the shops would be open.
I assumed the buffet price applied.
I assumed card payment would work.
None of these assumptions were unreasonable.
But reality has a habit of charging tuition fees when we stop paying attention.
I told her that even experienced people occasionally need a slap in the face.
Not a serious one.
Just enough to wake them up.
The older I get, the less I believe wisdom means avoiding mistakes.
Wisdom may simply mean being willing to learn from them.
Many people judge a day by whether everything went according to plan.
By that standard, this was not a particularly successful day.
The shopping center was closed.
The first restaurant failed.
The buffet cost more than expected.
The card machine did not work.
Nothing unfolded as intended.
And yet, on the drive home, my daughter and I had one of the more interesting conversations we have had in weeks.
We talked about assumptions.
We talked about paying attention.
We talked about Stoicism.
We even talked about dialectics.
I tried to explain how life often teaches through contradiction.
You expect one thing and receive another.
You resist the experience.
Then, eventually, you discover that the lesson was hidden inside the inconvenience all along.
Had everything gone according to plan, we probably would have spent the afternoon shopping.
Instead, we ended up discussing how reality repeatedly corrects our theories about reality.
That seems like a decent trade.
Schools have official curricula.
They teach mathematics, languages, history, and science.
Life has a curriculum too.
It is less organized.
The lessons arrive without warning.
There are no timetables.
There are no grades.
Sometimes the lesson comes disguised as a closed shopping center.
Sometimes it arrives in the form of an overpriced buffet.
Sometimes it is waiting beside a cash machine.
The hidden curriculum of bad days is not comfort.
It is attention.
Good days are enjoyable.
But bad days are often educational.
Good days confirm what we already know.
Bad days reveal what we have forgotten.
And sometimes a closed shopping center, an overpriced buffet, and an unexpected trip to a cash machine turn out to be worth more than a perfectly executed day.
At the end of our journey, I found myself thinking something I would not have expected that morning.
This was actually a very good trip.