Thinking Like a Kid

Indu and Chris: Let me know if  this is what you guys had in mind...and if it needs tweaking. :)

Thinking Like a Kid

by Kathryn Bennett*

Children are new to this world. Their voices are open, their bodies sprawl jointlessly, their brains are big and their bodies small. Their heads are disproportionately large. Perhaps that is why they dream a lot—they use their brains because their bodies have not caught up. Everything is new to them. Butterflies, air, sky, their own hand. It is all fascinating. Who knows what they will encounter next?

Children have more time on their hands than adults. They don’t have to go to work. Their work is to explore the universe. They are encouraged to play and write and dance. They come up with endless stories. I think adults lose this ability because we are eventually shut down by the world. We no longer get to wear hot pink culottes, polka dot bonnets, or sunglasses with Barbie dolls on them. It’s worse for boys, for even as children they are shut down when they want to dance ballet at open air music festivals or play with dolls.

We are all little kids at heart. But the world stops adoring us once we become adults. It is not enough that we just are. We are no longer cute and no one wants to hear us babble.   What has helped me to harness the lost skill of telling stories is having writing buddies. I love my writing group The Imago Inklings because we sit and write and share and talk. We encourage each other. I think it is important to write in community, to write for one another and not in isolation. I think it is important to find support for our playful side, to nurture the friends who are easy, and to try to be easier friends ourselves, to be less critical and more loving.  To say less and listen better. To create a safe place to create.

When our minds are off ourselves, we can most truly be ourselves.  Perhaps children, being so distracted by the newness of life, have their minds off themselves a little bit. Not that children aren’t selfish. They are. We are. But we can learn to be in awe again by participating in their awe of the world God created. It is, of course, fascinating and amazing. To meditate on creation, to take a walk in the sunshine, to notice how the autumn leaves cling to the trees or how the ordinary gravel crunches beneath our feet, is, perhaps, the first step back.

 *of the Imago Inklings Writing Group