Finding Your Spark

The magical piece of you that shines into the darkness

What is Spark?

I recently read Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls — the first parenting book I’ve read in quite a while. And it was really great, full of things to take away and think about. Most particularly, the concept of ‘spark’.

Despite the name of the book, this concept extends to every gender and age range. Don’t be put off!

This is not just an article for parents. While I first considered this concept in terms of my children, I quickly realized it had as much relevance for me as for them.

I suspect many of us could stand to shine a bit of light into our minds, dust off this concept, and bring it back into the light. Time, and the world, and all of the things that are life, can push this glorious, glimmering, fundamental thing right to the back of our mind-closets where little or no glow can escape.

What am I talking about?

There’s a sensitive period between ten and fourteen when children should be encouraged to seek and identify their spark. This is a concept originally theorized by Dr Peter Benson, one of the world’s leading experts on adolescence, according to Biddulph and many others. His opinion was that Spark was the single most important concept for transforming the home and school life of young people.

The idea is that young people almost always have something — or somethings, for the really lucky ones —

“an interest, enthusiasm, talent or concern — which, if it is supported, gives them incredible joy, motivation and direction. That thing is their spark.”

Biddulph summarises Benson’s study results as follows:

1. Asked the question, ‘What activity gives you the most joy, makes you feel alive, gives you a sense of purpose and excitement?’, 100 per cent of children understood the idea.

2. About 65 per cent of all kids could name at least one activity that filled those criteria for them. They knew what their spark was.

3. Another 20 per cent, if prompted by an adult who knew them, could also find their spark (they were just too shy to say so straight out.

4. Ten per cent of kids had more than one thing that sparked them.

Let’s look at Dr Benson’s own work from the Search Institute website. Here, Sparks are described like this:

Sparks are the hidden flames in kids that excite them and tap into their true passions.

Sparks come from the gut. They motivate and inspire. They’re authentic passions, talents, assets, skills, and dreams.

Sparks can be musical, athletic, intellectual, academic, or relational; from playing the violin to working with kids or senior citizens.

Sparks can ignite a lifelong vocation or career, or balance other activities to create an emotionally satisfying, enriched life.

Sparks get kids going on a positive path, away from the conflicts and negative issues — violence, promiscuity, drugs, and alcohol — that give teens a bad name and attract so much negative energy.

Take a second to reflect on your own life.

Does this make you look back on your own life and wonder what your spark is/was? Some of you might be lucky enough to know and to have been able to foster and develop it into full-on bonfire.

But perhaps many of us can look back to something we loved, and remember how we stopped doing it — maybe we moved away from where the lessons were, maybe there wasn’t enough money or time in the household, maybe no one cared enough or noticed our interest when it was needed.

My spark

I wonder what my sparks are? I know that writing is one. Love of language and languages is another. I have come back to these over and over, in various formats, throughout my life. When I have had to detour away from them, due to work, health or family responsibilities, I’ve always veered back around eventually to these things. It’s as if they call to me, or I am connected to them with a very stretchy elastic band. I can move away, but something always pulls me back. If I’m not there, I can feel the tension in the band, seeking to draw me in, even if the feeling is buried very deep, almost but never quite silent.

Does anything make you feel that way?

I also think about how much I love singing and how much I loved dancing as a child. These things I never pursued for one reason or another, and I have some regret about it now. But I can’t blame anyone in particular for it; my parents were very supportive of whatever we wanted to do, to the best of their abilities. I just didn’t push myself to develop these joys into something more.

In recent years, I have discovered a love of cooking, food, and food history and culture. It gives me no end of joy to think about, watch, listen to, read about and experiment with cooking and food. Perhaps I have reignited a very old, long-lost spark.

Thinking back, one of my happiest, most enduring memories is of the times I spent in my grandmother’s kitchen while she cooked. I don’t recall actually helping. But just being there was joyous. Once the dish was in the oven, we’d sit in her favorite chair and read or tell stories or just chat, all the while knowing that something delicious would soon be ours. That is a perfect bubble of joy in my memory — a tiny spark of what may have been. What is finally becoming.

Back to raising our kids:

Biddulph quoted Plutarch:

“The young are not vessels to be filled, they are fires to be lit.”

I think this is a good lesson for me — one of the things I looked forward to most about being a mother, and continue to enjoy, was the chance to teach my child, to introduce her to things I think she would like. But I need to make sure I don’t try to make her relive my own life or fulfill my own dreams of what might have been. She (and now her brother too) is her own person and I need to look at her objectively and ask, “what makes you tick — what do you want?” — not “what do I want you to want”?

Keeping the fire brightly lit

Once you have found your child’s spark, or rediscovered your own, how do you keep it alive? Only about a quarter of the young people Benson studied, according to Biddulph:

“were truly thriving in their lives, happy, engage and with a strong sense of where they were going.”

There are three critical things for a spark to really take off:

1. There needs to be an adult in her family who gets behind her.

2. There needs to be an adult outside the family — at school or in the community — who recognises and helps her.

3. There has to be the opportunity to carry it out.

As adults ourselves, we have the responsibility and the ability to act as our own motivators, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use a little help. Finding people who support your experiments and adventures into your own fledgling loves and passions is extremely important.

Someone to encourage you when things seem too difficult or just too much, on top of the rest of life’s burdens. Someone to tell you about the joy, the glow that they see in your eyes when you’re submerged in your spark. There have been such someones in my life over the years, who have helped to carry me over moments of dread or despair and I am so grateful.

I think everyone has multiple sparks, just waiting for that chance to ignite. Not all may survive, even when encouraged. We change, grow, encounter new stimuli as we get older. Things we never knew about might spark us as time goes on. Things we never had the opportunity or ability to try might suddenly be within our reach. If only you were to reach back and take that chance!

Spark is what gives you focus, meaning and joyful satisfaction in life — cherish your child’s and your own! Seek for signs of spark in yourself and your loved ones. Actively listen and wait for that little voice to whisper on the edge of thought. What do you dream of as you drift off to sleep?

And when you find one? Foster your spark to make it grow and flourish — feed it, love it, see where it leads.

I really hope this has got you thinking — it certainly did for me. I wonder where your sparks are hiding, and what fires they might light when you finally release them.

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