As outliers, Exceptionally and Profoundly (EPG) experiences are not ordinarily included in the creation of the social or cultural framework (think the accepted norms and expectations) of most societies.
Quite the opposite.
The experience of the EPG child or adult is effectively “data on the edge": there are so few of them in any particular (class, school, village, community, society) that, mostly, people do not know what to make of them.
Their behavior is different -- sometimes is obvious ways, and oftentimes in ways indefinable but nonetheless off-putting to some -- and, as previously stated, not easily parsed according to simplistic models of human psychology.
When we make the mistake of forming assumptions about what is happening for the EPG adult or child based on overt behavioral expressions -- what is said, or obvious behavioral mien – we are in jeopardy of error and gross miscalculation.
So, we need to dig a little deeper.
Be a little more patient.
Be willing to be surprised.
Be open to our own vulnerability - as parents, teachers, guides -- when the child knows more, knows without having been taught, or knows something about us that is startling or even unsettling.
They are not empty vessels. They come into the world already primed and stoked for learning. They are emergence, at the ready. From the very beginning.
And they have distinctive rhythms of development, of learning, of perceiving (sometimes blisteringly fast, and at other times, glacier-like in the expression of what they know and glacier-like in adopting a predetermined method of learning, some accepted way-to-be).
The EPG: on the edge of things . . . on the beautiful edge of things . . .
from:
"Excuse Me . . . Where do I Park my Whale? The Extraordinary Journey of the Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted."
A book-in-the-making,
by P. Susan Jackson.