A High-Five Education
Please click here to read more from this series!“There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed.”
— The Beatles, In My Life
I dreamt about you today. I rarely, if at all, dream about people I know or have met somewhere along the way. And so this dream was plenty to wake me, because we were seven again and life had yet to happen.
Even today, almost fifteen years later, you’re the first face I look for as I enter a classroom. Some part of me expects to see you there, on the last bench, with your mother next to you, you wearing your perpetual smile and your palm raised for your highly coveted high-fives.
In many ways, you were my first education; my first lesson in empathy and respect, my first rude awakening that the world was unfair and my first hope in knowing that one person could make a difference. I was old enough to notice that while the rest of us learned multiplication and cursive, your victories were measured differently. Even then, it seemed unbearably unfair that childhood could ask so much more of one little boy than it did of the rest of us.
I remember talking to your mother and asking her what your name was. I remember us sitting on the floor, around you and your mother, as we cut up blue and pink papers for the notice board, and she would help you paste them in pretty squares and circles.
In the classroom, she wasn’t just your mother. She was ours too. We’d sit with her, talk to her because we wanted to get to know you and why you loved high-fives so. Every morning, we’d come in and arrange all the desks and give you your high-fives and feel life flow into us, because your joy was that contagious. We’d listen to the random words you spoke and would play a crude version of word association and still lose to you; your mind worked in beautiful ways that we just could never fathom.
I see children who remind me of you often now, as I’ve grown up a bit and have begun venturing out into the world. But it’s not often they exude the same joy and love you and your mother did. Some have already learned to be quiet, to shrink themselves before the world asks them to. And I’m so violently reminded of the fact that the world is unfair again, and it is a unique grief to feel helpless in the face of it all.
I don’t talk about you to anyone; sometimes I wish I could. So here I am writing you down, because it’s the only way I know to say thank you.
I think about you every time I give a high-five and hope you’re out there somewhere, high-fiving life in the face.
“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”
— Karl Barth
Thoughtfully yours,
D
This post first appeared on the contemplative elf (Substack) on August 29, 2026.
[Featured image: Roman, B. (2016). Walking Peoples Handmade Painting, Vector illustration]
Previously on Random Specific Thoughts:
