One day in the early summer, as we were making our way
inside for circle time, one of our kids stopped and gasped. He pointed up to
the sky, saying it was beautiful. We looked, with great expectations, but
didn’t see anything highly unusual at first. At second glance, we noticed that
the very blue sky was speckled with little pieces of “fluff.” They were filling the sky, actually. It
looked like a first snow of winter, but it was warm. He’s right – it was beautiful.
The cottonwood tree was responsible for such summer beauty. When I looked up at
it, I took a good, deep sigh, before continuing on. My thought at that moment
was: that is it. These moments are what make up the many things that children
see, even when the same things pass us by. It’s like they have an extra sense.
A sense of wonder is something we are fortunate to hang on to in adulthood, but
unfortunately, it is too easy to lose or let wane.
Lately, it has been occurring to me how what we learn about
child development is based on what children gain along the way: cognitively,
physically, socially, emotionally, etc. While this is a logistical way of
learning about child development, I sometimes wonder how we would view children
differently if we learned instead (or also) what is lost through the process of
child development or “growing up.” What if we paid attention to when the
imagination loses its liveliness, or when our other-worldliness tapers off, or
when life starts to become more rushed and we begin to lose the pace of a
wonder-filled life? My theory is that if we paid attention to those things, we
would start to value them more in children, and start to honor children more
wholly.
My own kids call anything that resembles “fluff” a wish. A
wish can be a dandelion seed, a feather that has escaped a down coat, a piece
of wool, etc. That day we looked up and saw the cottonwood fluff decorating the
sky, I thought of them each being a wish. Imagine if we could just look up and
see a whole sky full of wishes. What would that be like? And is that what it’s
like to be a child?
My wish is for our society to honor and learn from a child’s
innocent sense of wonder.
