kindergarten lessons
Some years ago there was a book that everyone seemed to be giving everyone else at around Christmas, called “All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” and its down-home wisdom and whimsical style charmed many. For there are many basic understandings about social life that we take in at that tender age, such as to share things, take time for a nap, be nice, and so on, which is about all I retain from the book.
But there may also be another dimension to the lives of little children that the author missed out. That is, simply put, that the child at that age is a true archetypal Innocent, one who can be authentically herself, and she will soon enough be corrupted into duplicity and manipulation, and will want what others have simply because those things convey status. For a short amount of time the child will like what she personally likes simply because she likes it, and peer pressure about what’s acceptable is hardly considered at all. When the switch happens innocence has been, if not lost, at least compromised. It is the qualities of the Innocent that we may want to note before they are lost. Possibly we may even want to honor them, too.
The Innocent is envied by adults. According to Emerson’s famous comparison, adults cluster around babies and admire them because the child is simply authentically being herself, and is not conforming to any social expectations, and the rest of us, who have society’s rules to care about, find this almost unbelievably enviable.
If we take this further then we’d have to say that children are, temporarily, allowed something that the rest of us struggle to achieve; a certainty about what we want and need. A child will almost always say what it needs, and expect that someone will do something about it. Of course, sometimes the child will try to manipulate, but that’s a learned skill. The basic pattern of ‘I need and I have the right to ask, even to expect decent treatment’ is what I’m talking about here. It presupposes that the child knows she has a right to ask, that she is loveable and loved. If only some of the adults we know had such good self-esteem and could be as charmingly direct! If only some of our professional colleagues with whom we work would do the same thing - and abandon their passive-aggressive silliness! If only I could be as open, myself!
And perhaps that is the lesson that most strikes me. Children who are just being themselves are direct, loving, and above all they know how to forgive. Observe a small child who is hungry, who is wailing for food. Tears! Deep distress! Then Mom appears, with food. What happens? Usually the young child will instantly forget the distress that had recently seemed so heart-rending. There are no recriminations, there are no where-have-you-been-all-this-time pouts and withholdings. There are no scenes in which the child says she’ll never trust her mother again. That won’t come for a number of years. Instead there is simply acceptance and love. And forgiveness. The child says, in effect, wherever you’ve been all this time doesn’t matter, because you’re here now.
If only the rest of us - all of us, without exceptions - could be so quick to forgive. Perhaps the lesson we can take form this is that forgiveness can’t happen unless we are loving, unless we are focused on the present, and unless we can access the Innocent that surely exists in each of us.
