Dr. Grauer's Column - The Space Between

The Space Between
By Stuart Grauer

Let your question stay long enough to begin teaching you.

It was springtime. The surf was booming against the rocks at La Jolla Cove, sending up bursts of spray that glittered in the late sun. Below us, the seals were draped everywhere — sprawled like wet commas on the black, jutting sandstone shelves, blinking in that sleepy primordial way of animals who belong exactly where they are.

Then a small one slipped down the rock, and in. He was steel gray, polished almost, like a river stone. He vanished into the churning water just as a set of waves rolled through, crosscurrents folding over one another in messy white spirals, then slamming into the rocky cliff.

“He’s not coming up,” my wife, Sally, said immediately. “He can’t breathe.”

“He’s playing,” I said.

“He’s just a little baby.”

“He’s older than that.” It was big for a seal pup. (Read: I don’t know anything about seals.)

We both were leaning forward now, invested, watching. The pup was flowing with the moving water just below the surface. With everything moving around, you could not tell if he got his head much above water. A couple minutes went by, the pup’s body hovering in the wash.

A smooth, dark head picked up from the rocks just 10 feet away — the mother. She slid into the water with seally, liquidy grace. She began angling toward the spot where the pup had gone under, was still under.

“There,” Sally said. “She’s rescuing him.”

“She’s hunting,” I said. “That’s what they do. That’s what the pup’s doing. He’s fine. They’re hunting.”

The pup still didn’t seem to surface. Where was their breathing from again?

“I don’t like this,” she said. “The baby shouldn’t stay under that long.”

“It’s not even a baby, it’s more like a kid,” I said, “Seal pups can hold their breath for minutes. They’re born swimmers. They store oxygen.”

“He could drown. The mother’s coming to him,” she said.

“The pup’s fine. He’s hunting. He’s hungry.”

The mother reached the spot of the pup. For a moment nothing happened — just foam and surge and the messiness of the sea. Then she gave a little nuzzle and the pup’s head popped up right beside her. And here’s what happened then: She didn’t scold him. She didn’t drag him back to the rocks. She just curved her body around him, like a comma, and nudged him with her nose. “That’s the air up there,” she maybe was saying. And that’d be that.

For a few seconds they floated chest to chest in the wash of the waves. Close up it seemed treacherous and loud, but wide angle it was just a typical day of waves washing in and out, the endless surge and dredge.

“See?” Sally said. “She’s helping him breathe. She’s comforting him.”

“Or,” I countered, “she’s orienting him. Seal mothers do this,” I surmised. “Look at all those currents—that’s where the food is moving around — anchovies, smelt, little schooling fish. She’s saying, This is where you learn.” I was really slinging the old bull around.

The pup dropped below the water again. Sally made a small involuntary noise.

“Relax,” I said. “She’ll let him struggle. He’s ready to learn to catch fish himself. She can’t do that for him.”

“That doesn’t mean she abandons him when he needs air,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It means she cares enough to let him figure it out.”

We stood there, taking up our positions, she as the guardian of breath and safety, and I as the defender of risk and immersion, the seals as seals, entirely unconcerned with our theories which had a whole lot more to do with our own needs than theirs.

The mother circled once more. The pup surfaced, rode a wave sideways, vanished again. “Well,” Sally said finally, “maybe he is playing now.”

“He really wasn’t breathing for a while there,” I caved, “He was under for a pretty long time. She nudged him up to the surface.”

Walking back up the bluff, of course I was becoming aware of how ridiculous our projections were beside the roaring sea. And knowing that in schools we replay that same conversation every day. Sure, we need the teachers and parents who notice when a child seems to be under too long. Who sense fear, loneliness, or real danger before anyone else does. Who move instinctively toward protection, reassurance, and rescue if necessary. Those are guardians of breath, making sure students feel safe enough to stay in the water at all.

And we need the elders attuned to the deeper cycle of growth and survival, who know that learning often looks chaotic and even frightening from the shore. Who can tolerate even a little battering against the rocks, and the struggle, trusting that strength is being built in those currents. Both are guides to the hunt as students discover how to find meaning and nourishment for themselves.

The miracles, of course, are those teachers and parents who do both. The miracle school can do both, like that seal mother —cradling for a moment, a perfect little nudge, then letting the young swimmer disappear again into the vast living ocean that is his home.

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