Wisdom of Children

I’ve always felt that children and youth have a lot to teach us. One lesson is the joy that most young children share—they are mostly happy to be here. They focus on the present, sometimes their present lasts only five minutes, but it’s a great five minutes! They appreciate nature, grass, trees, animals. They are generally true to themselves, and you can pretty much tell how they are feeling; they aren’t hiding their emotions. They speak their truth, even if it’s—“I absolutely hate this!” said by my young grandson, when he opened a birthday present of clothes!

I love kids. I like that they still get excited about things that many adults take for granted, like even a new flavor of ice-cream they haven’t tried before. When I was young, my Uncle Andy made memories for us kids. Every Mother’s Day we got together as a family and he hid coins in the backyard sandpile for the kids to dig out. Uncle Andy built a really cool playhouse/fort on stilts for his son, which the cousins also got to play in. He told us stories about Red Hot, a character he made up that we loved. And he had treasure hunts that had us running all over the yard to find clues.

I guess he inspired me. I realized those memories I had as a child were great, and I wanted to create some fun memories for the kids in my life. So, I’m ending with a quote from Forest Witcraft, the managing editor of Scouting Magazine in 1950:

“A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove…but the world may be better because I made a difference in the life of a child.”

Let’s make that difference!

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash