Spelling Bees and Simple Living

Worth thinking about #1: This year’s national spelling bee champ, Evan O’Dorney, spent two or three hours every night drilling spelling words. Yet he doesn’t actually seem to like spelling all that much. In fact, he told NPR, “I’m not gonna do words anymore, just numbers and notes.” (Listen to the entire interview by clicking “listen” on the NPR story page.)

Now, I’m all for excellence and intellectualism, but at what cost? That sounds like a sort of intellectual post-traumatic stress disorder. To have already overdosed on words at age thirteen?! Bummer.

Worth thinking about #2: I found Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea in my mom’s “special things” box. Lindbergh wrote in the 1950s about being a woman in “modern America,” contemplating the need to find “space” (and one’s space) amidst the pace and obligation and noise of “modern life.” Someone named “Kathy” gave the book to my mom in 1969, and here I am reading it in 2007. It makes me wonder how far back this frustration with over-stimulated, over-obligated, and under-meaning existence goes. Forever? I’d better stop there; Lindbergh, not I, is the one with “interesting things to say” tonight . . .

“For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.”

And, for champion spellers (and their high-achieving adult counterparts): “We had indeed almost drowned in the sea of intellectual work and welcomed the firm ground of physical action under our feet.”