I sometimes feel a conundrum in that the child version of myself is obligated to exist inside this aging body that I am carting around these days. I seem to know or understand less about this human race we are part of than I did when I was eight years old. The world has become noisier, louder, with more shouting and less listening, more judgment than acceptance than the days when I could pull a newborn calf into my arms and clearly know my purpose.
I have no interest in growing up. I remember turning 10 and the feeling of having arrived, but that was framed by attaining the standard age in our house that granted me permission to have my very own bicycle. My parents let me choose my new bike under the kind guidance of Don Law in the basement of his hardware store where all the bicycles were lined up.
It was a beautiful sight, and I pointed to a bright blue CCM with white streamers hanging from the handlebars. I now had wheels, wheels that would take me up and down our long lane, eventually able to hold my line of trajectory without crashing into the ditch. I had wheels that would take me to the July 1 parade down Scott Street, dressed as Sir John Alexander Macdonald, complete with top hat, streamers woven through the spokes in red, white and blue, before I understood his flawed ideas of how to build a nation.
I am drawn to the writing of Charles Lamb, who must have felt what I feel, his pen weaving essays that intimately captured the desire to cling to childhood while having a deep understanding of the emotional truth of which children are capable.
Adulthood, as Lamb so clearly wrote, is the “emotional afterlife” of childhood. He wrote with a tender “almost fragile intimacy” while being aware of how memory has the power to comfort and to wound. His friend William Wordsworth penned poetry as testimony to a child’s “spiritual purity”. I think of J.M. Barrie whose Peter Pan was evidence of Barrie mourning his own lost childhood.
Children find wonder in the ordinary, see the possibilities that bloom there—a cardboard box is a spaceship or castle; a shadow has a personality and deserves a name; a puddle is a portal to another world. Each day is a brand-new, shiny opportunity. We think of children as being naïve, unable to see the truth, but I think the truth is far clearer to a child, with their empathy safely intact, their emotions unfiltered, and where magic is a possibility, not a fantasy. We think of aging as the acquisition of wisdom.
I would argue that in some cases, aging is the loss of wisdom as we gain factual knowledge, the two being quite different.
Adults are often unable to take the time to see, feel and be. We categorize childhood as the space we occupy as we learn to walk, switch out our teeth for bigger ones, develop a vocabulary, and, before long, we educate the purity out of children and replace it with a far more critical, controlled approach, where children are required to fit into a single mode of learning.
A child’s wisdom is not weighed down by adult assumptions and children have a much keener awareness and perception of the world. Children don’t just see a tree or a rainbow; they perceive it on so many levels. Writers able to capture a child’s essence on the page do their writing from inside a child’s consciousness, complete with all its wonder.
I think of my favourite Harper Lee, whose child narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird has a moral clarity that the adults around her have lost, a clarity that exposes the hypocrisy of the behaviour to which Scout is witness.
Children live in the moment and understand emotional truth before they have the vocabulary to explain it. A child’s world is larger, filled with differences and similarities, and is more alive. If only we could all wrap up our childlike innocence and carry it forward with us, even in some small amount, to clarify our choices, the world would be better off.
