Day 26: Through the Eyes of a Child

For the past few days, I’ve been contemplating what it means to see life through the eyes of a child. To have that “child-like faith” that the Bible speaks about. And I’ve discovered that as an adult, it’s a lot harder than I expected.

First of all, there’s a big difference between child-LIKE and child-ISH. I can be the latter quite easily. You know, the stamping-my-foot, everything-isn’t-going-my-way, two-year-old behavior that seems to be my fallback response whenever the defecation hits the rotary oscillator.

No, “child-like faith” puts the emphasis on the “faith” – which is where my jaded adult outlook falls short.

Halloween brought this idea home to me. That once-a-year opportunity to be someone else, which in childhood evoked feelings of great potential but in adulthood tends to foster feelings of regret. What happened to the days when every morning meant new possibilities? When every night brought sleep filled with sweet dreams? When did that all change? And can it ever come back again?

I tried for several days to see things through the eyes of a child. I kicked through piles of leaves (until I started worrying about tripping on an unseen rock and twisting an ankle), breathed in the crisp fall air (at least till the mold spores started my allergies up), and dug into the Halloween candy bowl (but just one bite-size Snickers at 90 calories apiece).

When faced with some bad news, I thought about how I would have handled it as a child. I think I would not have even recognized it as bad news, but if I did, I would have assumed that my parents or some other adult would fix it, and then I would have just gone about my merry way.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why seeing things through the eyes of a child is so hard to do as an adult. Because there isn’t anyone left to fix it. We’re the grownups now, and we know the dark secret that our parents never told us: They couldn’t fix it. Not then and certainly not now. No one can fix it.

The leaves disguise hidden rocks and the air holds invisible allergens and the Halloween candy will make you fat and clog your arteries and eventually kill you. And once the genie is out of the bottle, once the truth is revealed, it’s not really possible to readjust your vision and go back to the way you used to see life. We are no longer children. And we can no longer pretend to be.