Rule Following

“Johnny, you’ve gone outside the boundaries. Please come back inside the boundaries. Then you can have the ball again.”

I’m currently sitting in Washington Square Park in Center City Philly. It’s a little breezy, but also a quite pleasant mid-October day. Sun is shining. Still warm. Very nice.

And at least four different groups of preschool kids are here playing with their adult teachers. I just heard the above from the group playing a game just behind me in the grass. Johnny was off doing his own thing. Didn’t seem to care too much about the ball. Or what the others were doing.

From one perspective, the teacher’s admonishment was good leadership in a civilized society. We, the adults, agree to the set of rules. We instruct our young ones to obey those rules through both carrots and sticks. We work to keep them within the boundaries,, hoping that someday they want to stay within those boundaries.

If they do, we call them good, and we pat ourselves on the back.

It makes sense. How could we possibly put 300 million, or 8 billion, humans on this planet in any other civilized fashion without defining and enforcing some set of rules?

I’m a rule-follower. Always have been. Whether by nature or nurture, this is how I think.

But as I age, I often wonder.

Is it the rule-followers that make the difference?