“We are all in the gutters but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde
“Wanna go see a cave?”
I look down to see my friend’s six-year-old daughter tugging at my shirt, doing her best to distract me from the conversation I was having with her parents and their friends.
Her eyes are wide and full of possibility.
“Absolutely!” I enthusiastically reply.
“Okay,” she says, pausing in between excited breaths to create a plan.
She thinks for a minute, clearly knowing more about the necessities for cave exploration than an amateur like myself.
“I’ll go get my headlamp. You go put on your sandals and then meet me back here.”
Then she disappeared down the hallway.
Five minutes later, she was back with a headlamp strapped to her head, well enough to function but somewhat askew.
She was ready for our adventure but not without a warning:
“Okay, you can come with me but PROMISE me you’ll be careful.”
She paused.
“Okay,” I said, “I promise.”
My breaths were short and shallow,
I was nervous but I wasn’t going to tell her. I didn’t want my curious, adventurous guide to know how I was feeling.
Then we were off, running through the side of their yard, danger around every turn.
“Remember what I told you!”
Two minutes later, we were under their deck. We could hear the footsteps of some crazy, insane monsters above us.
She called them “adults” and warned me all about them.
“It’s REALLY scary in this cave,” she said.
She was right. It was pretty terrifying and I was super glad we had her headlamp. The sun was beginning to set and soon it’d be too dark to see.
At least that’s what she told me. It was a little after 5:00PM on a sunny day. The sun wasn’t ue to set for another two hours...but you could never be sure with these tricky caves.
“We should leave. We have animals to save!”
The animals! How could I forget?
A few minutes later and we’re playing doctor, stitching up stuffed animals with toilet paper.
“Put on your gloves. You’re going to need to wear them if we’re going to treat them.”
She raised one hand over the other, gesturing like she was struggling to pull on the clearly-too-small for her hands gloves. I did the same.
She pulled out a box of band-aids and handed them to me.
“Okay, I’m going to need you to stitch up Mr. Sparkles.”
She grabbed the unicorn doused in glitter.
Mr. Sparkles was in bad shape.
We healed him up, sent him on his way, and were off.
In the span of an hour or so, we were explorers of a dark and dank cave, doctor’s saving endangered species (the unicorns!), Olympians in a foot race [she won...obviously], and we also devised a plan to make flight possible - without airplanes. When I suggested we could just used airplanes, she said that was too boring.
She also beat me in Candyland. This was pretty heart-breaking - beaten [destroyed, really] at a game from my own childhood. It felt like a battle of the generations and she had won.
As they were leaving, one of her parent's friends commented, “you were really good with her.”
What?
I wasn’t aware I was doing anything.
If anything, I felt like she did me a favor.
She taught me a lot in the few short days I spent at their house.
Here are the three biggest lessons I learned from a six year old, a child significantly more enlightened than I could ever hope to be.
Three Lessons I Learned From a Six Year Old:
1.) Practice Presence.
We often chide or chastise children as they bounce from one mood to the next. Children are prone to mood swings that, at an advanced age, could be a diagnosable and treatable condition. However, because they are still early in their development as human beings, we forgive them - well, somewhat - for their mood swings. But something dawned on me.
I’m not around kids much so I’m able to bring a bit more patience to my encounters with them. I never had younger siblings so whenever I get a chance to step into their world for a few minutes, I embrace it. I saw her changing from happiness [wanna play Candlyand? What about TWO games of Candyland? At once?!] to all-out panic [like the one time she got what appeared to be a papercut and acted like she had lost a full finger] or dramatic hobbling [they were jumping on a trampoline for a few hours and her legs hurt and she looked like one of those people who had just finished a marathon, being carried by her mom and all... but this one I totes get - have you ever jumped on a trampoline for an extended period of time?].
When I left, her world shattered. She was crying and latched on to me like Sam Smith. She was devastated, afraid to go on...and then her babysitter came and she was over me.
She was so intensely present with whatever she was experiencing at that moment that she committed wholeheartedly to it. Sure, some people might say this is a learned behavior to express how she is feeling and get what she wants in a particular interaction or whatever else but I’m choosing to see it differently. Especially with this kid - she could communicate the heck out of a feeling.
To me, it seemed like she was fully committed to the present and so when we struck up a game of Candyland, there was no concern about what was for dinner, where LeBron was going to sign, what political pundit had said what silly thing - there was only the matter at hand. Embarrassing me at a board game of chance that I chose to talk trash [to a six year old] about.
I chose to play along. When you see the world through their eyes, you see things differently. Because their world is different. Their Universe is different. Not yet burdened by words like “impossible” and “can’t.”
What, as an adult [I use this term loosely], can I learn from this?
When I picked up the golden goodie gum drop in Candyland and had to backslide damn near down the whole board, my world was shattered but when I got the chocolate ice cream cone that allowed me to jump towards the front of the back, almost near guaranteeing a win, I was elated like, well, I had just gotten a chocolate ice cream cone.
Try being that present in the next conversation you have. Don’t just hear, listen. Don’t just listen, step into their world. Their universe.
You might get a chocolate ice cream cone.
2.) Live in Possibility.
The only limit to your imagination is possibility - believing a thing to be possible.
So when she said “I want to fly” and then when I said, “we already can...in airplanes…” and then when she said, “No, that’s boring - I want to fly like a bird,” I said, “okay, how? Let’s find a way to make it happen,” instead of saying, no. There were times when she had less than stellar ideas - we all do - but instead of saying, “hey, don’t do that!” or “you can’t do that!” I’d say, “Why don’t we try this instead?” That might not always work - I have a study size of n=1 that ran for a few hours - but it seemed to keep possibility open. At least for the time being.
Eventually, we gave up on the flight thing, satisfied with theoretically exploring what it would take to conjure up the materials to mimic bird’s wings and then we probably went to look for a stick - the perfect stick - for the dog to play with. Or build a wing. Or just to spend time enthused with looking for a stick.
And in between all of that, for a brief moment - flight, real human flight - was possible.
Maybe the only reason this entertained me so much is because she jumped from idea to idea quicker than my ADHD - I’m open to that being a possibility (see what I did there?) - but it showed me how “impossible” is a learned thing.
Here’s the thing: language is learned. And it dictates how we understand and make sense of reality.
That means that there was a point in time where we didn’t know - like literally could not understand - what impossible meant. Which means it just wasn’t a part of our world.
When did we learn what impossible meant? When and why did we place limits on ourselves? When did we forget what it was to dream wide awake?
When did we forget the infinite nature of possibility?
A friend asked me once if I believed teleportation was possible. I was hesitant to answer. He paused and then said, “Okay, what if I had asked you this same question fifty years ago except about a cell phone call? Would you have believed that you could talk into a plastic box, have your voiced encoded into 0s and 1s, bounced into space and off a satellite that we happened to put there and just stayed conveniently floating out there, then bounced back into our atmosphere before landing on someone else’s plastic box and then they heard it, understood it, and responded to you? All in less than a second?”
Sure, when you put it that way, teleportation is possible. We’re kind of already doing it.
I chose to use words full of possibility. If for nothing else, it made looking for the perfect stick fun for an hour.
3.) The World is a Playground
The world is a playground and your mind is a toy fueled by imagination.
We get so bogged down in the things we have to do.
Cook dinner.
Go to work.
Take care of our children.
That we forget the things we get to, or can, do.
Enjoy a meal.
Make a difference.
Play with our kids.
That we forget these things are teeming to the brim with infinite possibility.
When did life become a chore? Something we HAVE to do instead of something we get to do? Something we’re blessed to do?
I’m not saying I’ll ever enjoy doing the laundry or the dishes - I’m not superhuman - but where can we take a second and choose to change our perspective?
Where, right now, can you bring a little gratitude to something that previously bothered you? What can you learn from that challenging situation?
I’ve contemplated on the purpose of life...like, a lot - and so far the best answer I have is this:
The purpose of life is to enjoy it and help others do the same.
That’s it. At least for now.
Get out there and play.