306 Feet, and Nothing I Said Mattered

Leviathan is 306 feet tall. Canada’s Wonderland is fairly pleased about this — tallest and fastest coaster in the park, an eighty-degree drop, 148 kilometres an hour, faster than most trains in this country.

My daughter had decided, well before we got there, that this was the day.

We had planned the whole thing as a families trip — a few families, a pile of kids, one last day together before school started in September. In the car, the ride got discussed the way generals discuss a campaign. Which row. Eyes open or shut. Who would scream.

Then we reached the line, and everyone looked up at the track, and the campaign quietly dissolved. Maybe later. It’s a long wait anyway.

I didn’t say anything. I just listened.

The whole essay in three sentences

A scared child will not be talked onto a roller coaster by their parent, no matter how well you argue it. Minutes later they will walk on anyway, because their friends are walking on.

That is not a flaw in our kids. It is how people are built, and Sikhi named it sangat long before anyone ran a study on it.

So the highest-value thing many of us can do for our children’s Sikhi is not another book, class or lecture. It is finding three or four families who are serious about the Guru and have kids the same age — and then actually seeing them, often, for years.

If you stop reading here, you have the point. If you have five more minutes, I’ll show you what I watched, what the research says, and the one small thing to do this week.

What actually happened in that line

Later, the group re-formed. Not a rally, not a dare — just kids standing around talking about it. Some were plainly scared. Some were thrilled and said so. Nobody argued anyone into it.

And somewhere in that conversation the group generated enough energy between them to simply go and do it. They went. They came off the far end lit up, and went again.

I want to be precise about what I did not do, because this is the part that stayed with me. I did not motivate anyone. I did not explain the safety record, or reason with anyone about how the fear would pass after the first drop, or deliver the small speech I could feel forming. Any of that would have moved my kids exactly nothing.

Ten kids in a loose circle did in four minutes what I could not have done in an hour.

Nothing about the ride had changed. The height was the same. The only variable was who was standing next to them.

It wasn’t just the coaster

Once you see it, you see it everywhere, and it isn’t confined to roller coasters.

I have watched my son come off a soccer pitch and immediately fall into a review with his friends — what went wrong, who should have been where, what they’d do differently next match. Nobody assigned that. No parent asked for it. They care about it because the others care about it.

The same thing happens with kirtan practice. With studying. A child whose friends are getting better at something quietly starts getting better at it, and the effort stops feeling like effort, because it has stopped being a thing that was asked of them and become a thing that is simply done around here.

Researchers who study children’s friendships have been pointing at this for years: kids adjust their ambitions to match their friends’ ambitions, and their achievement drifts toward their friends’ achievement. There is also a shift in the teenage years that every parent eventually meets — as children move into adolescence, the weight they give to peer opinion rises, and the weight they give to ours falls. Not to zero. But the ranking changes.

I found that oddly freeing rather than depressing. I only get a few years as the main voice in my kids’ ears. Rather than spend them talking louder, I’d rather spend them making sure that when my voice fades, the ones that replace it are good.

Sikhi named this long ago

We tend to file our children’s friendships under logistics — playdates, pickups, background scenery around the important business of grades and activities. Gurbani treats it as something far weightier. In Sikhi, the company you keep is one of the main things that shapes a person — sangat sits close to the centre of the whole path.

ਸਤਸੰਗਤਿ ਕੈਸੀ ਜਾਣੀਐ ॥ ਜਿਥੈ ਏਕੋ ਨਾਮੁ ਵਖਾਣੀਐ ॥

satasangat kaisee jaaneeai. jithai eko naam vakhaaneeai.

“How is the Society of the Saints to be known? There, the Name of the One Lord is chanted.”

— Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Ang 72

Read what Guru Nanak Dev Ji does not say. Sangat is not defined by surname, by village, by who happens to be in the same building on a Sunday. It is defined by what is spoken there — by what the group treats as its centre of gravity.

Every group of children has a centre of gravity. It is made of what gets praised, what gets laughed at, and what nobody thinks to question. Kids don’t choose it consciously. They absorb it the way they absorb an accent.

And Guru Raam Daas Ji gives the mechanism itself:

ਜਿਉ ਲੋਹਾ ਪਾਰਸਿ ਭੇਟੀਐ ਮਿਲਿ ਸੰਗਤਿ ਸੁਵਰਨੁ ਹੋਇ ਜਾਇ ॥

jio lohaa paaras bheteeai mil sangat suvaran hoi jai.

“Just as iron is transmuted into gold by the touch of the Philosopher’s Stone, so are people transformed by joining the Sangat, the Holy Congregation.”

— Guru Raam Daas Ji, Ang 303

Iron does not argue itself into becoming gold. It doesn’t get lectured into it. It is changed by contact.

It worked on me, in both directions

I am not writing this as an observation about children. I am writing it as someone it happened to.

When I was young there was a stretch where the company I kept pulled me steadily away — away from studying, away from Sikhi. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no single decision I could point to and call a mistake. It was drift, and drift doesn’t announce itself.

What turned it was not a lecture and not a book. It was finding the sangat of Gursikhs who were genuinely dedicated to the Guru. Being around people who did their Nitnem without it ever being a discussion, for whom the Guru was the actual centre of the day — that did the thing that nobody’s advice had managed to do. It made the good thing look normal.

So when I watch my kids standing at the edge of something they’re afraid of, I am not observing something new. I am watching my own life play out at a smaller scale, faster.

That’s also why I try not to be too proud of the parenting. Half of what I would take credit for is really just the room I was standing in.

What I think this asks of us

Most of us pour our energy into the content of our children’s Sikhi — the classes, the paath, the camps, the books, the reminders — and comparatively little into the context. We hand them the ride and then wonder why they won’t get on alone.

They were never built to get on alone.

Which makes the job larger and stranger than teaching. Here is what I’d actually do:

Build the circle deliberately — and start smaller than you think. You are not founding a community. You are picking three or four families who are serious about the Guru and have kids near your kids’ ages, and putting them in the calendar on repeat. One Saturday a month, same weekend, rotating houses. That’s it. The whole thing lives or dies on whether it’s recurring or whether someone has to organise it every single time.

Give it unstructured time, not occasions. Friendship is built in the loose hours — long drives, sleepovers, the hanging around after class that everyone is trying to leave. An annual event does not make a friend group. Repetition does.

Make your home the house they gather at. Feed them. Be warm. Be unembarrassing, if you can manage it. The house the kids choose is the house that shapes the kids.

Start early, because the window narrows. The years when you are the main voice are the years to install the circle. By the time peer opinion outranks yours, the circle is either already there or it isn’t.

Name the pattern out loud. You cannot vet every friendship, and trying will only teach your child to hide things from you. What you can do is talk openly about how much the people around us shape us — that this is simply how we are made, and that it works beautifully when you choose well — so your child learns to notice it for themselves.

Remember you are sangat too. The adults your child watches you choose, the conversations at your table, what your family laughs at. They’re already standing in that line.

The circle can go wrong too

One warning, and it’s the failure I’d watch for most.

A circle can be built for the wrong reason. If the point quietly becomes keeping up appearances in front of other Sikh parents, the kids will smell it immediately, and rightly want no part of it. The circle only does its work when the adults in it actually want to be there.

And if there isn’t another Sikh family within an hour’s drive of you, you haven’t failed at this. Distance is real. A handful of families you see three times a year with intent will do more than a nearby group you attend out of obligation.

One small thing this week

If you do nothing else with this essay, do this.

Think of two families whose kids you would be glad to see your kids turn into. Not perfect families. Just ones where the Guru is genuinely part of the house.

Message them today and put one date in the calendar. Not an event, not a program — a Saturday, your house, kids running around, chai. Then, before everyone leaves, pick the next date while you’re all standing there. That second date is the whole trick. It’s the difference between a nice afternoon and a sangat.

It takes about four minutes to send the message. That’s the same four minutes those kids needed at the bottom of the ride.

The ride is still 306 feet

My kids did not become braver that afternoon. They became accompanied. And being accompanied did what every good argument I had failed to do.

Guru Sahib gave us sangat not as a pleasant social arrangement but because this is simply how people work. We do not move forward alone. We move forward next to someone.

And we have been asking for exactly this all along, most of us without noticing. It is sitting in the Ardas we do every day:

ਸੇਈ ਪਿਆਰੇ ਮੇਲ ਜਿਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਮਿਲਿਆ ਤੇਰਾ ਨਾਮ ਚਿਤ ਆਵੇ

seiee piaare mel, jinhaa(n) miliaa teraa naam chit aave

“Unite me with those beloved ones, meeting whom Your Name comes to mind.”

— from the Ardas

Not make me strong. Not make me successful. Put me next to the right people. That is the request — and it is the same one I want to make for my children. That they end up beside people who make the good things look ordinary, and that when they reach the frightening thing, whatever it turns out to be, they look to their left and find someone already walking toward it.

They’ll follow. That’s what kids do.

That’s what all of us do.

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Who is actually in your child’s sangat right now — and did you build it on purpose, or did it just happen? I’d genuinely like to hear how other families have gone about this, especially those of you far from a Sikh community.

Maastarji.com makes free, English-first Punjabi and Sikhi learning resources for diaspora families.