How Wonderful To Know So Very Little!

I don’t advise doing this.
Well, not regularly, anyway.

Brushing your teeth at night, while smiling and laughing at the video on your phone.
The skull-shaking vibrating brush slips, you see.
Right across your face.
And sucking in a lungful of toothpaste foam can only result in messy bathroom mirrors.

There’s a great deal that we could say is wrong with our world; our era in earth’s history.
But seeing your fifth grandchild gurgling and giggling in Coogee, Australia…
While shuffling from the shower in your Christmas-present slippers in West Sussex…

Well, that can’t be one of them, can it?

New Life.
Daily Adventures.
Hourly Discoveries.

How I envy him.
This child.
Seeing the world anew.
Whatever happened to Life In That Magical Lane?

Which is why I rejoice over the work that I do.

I get to listen to creative minds exploding with such wild, adventurous and impossible thinking .
Or, perhaps, just wondering and weighing and questioning.

Imaginations reaching for starlight with a baby’s soft fingers.
While wrestling with the everyday of leading a business.

And then, I get to hear the drama and jubilation when they and their team give birth to Something So Improbable.
This New Creation that they’ve planned and hoped and striven over.

This Thing that was once a mere jot and scribble on a lined notepad.
This New Offering that is unexpected and meaningful and delighting.

Meanwhile…
As I think back to “gurgling and giggling”…

I love the experience of being asked to see through the eyes of a child, don’t you?
I love to be reminded of a perspective that was once uncluttered and pure.

I’m so thankful that I can be shaken out of my weary adult disbelief and my sometimes-tested faith.
By a child’s view of “This Also Is Possible”.

And I relish the realisation that people – striving people – allow me each week, as I coach them, to enter the world of their mind, their will, their emotions.

They help me to be a child again.
A child listening to their unaccustomed thoughts.
Thoughts that would never, ever have occurred to me…
If I’d travelled two lifetimes.

Heaven help us the day we believe that we have arrived – satisfied in our own mighty knowledge!
That’s the day we’re in danger of becoming puny in our wisdom.

To discover again.
To adventure again.
To be as curious as an infant.
To grasp for Things-Just-Beyond-Our-Reach.

This is part of the joy of life!

So, with all of my railing and ranting about today’s invasive, consuming technology.
And accepting the isolation brought on by a pandemic-beset world….

I’m grateful for the power that brings each fascinating being into my room – my West Sussex ShedQuarters – from afar.
Each one eager to show me the different world that they dance in.
Each one teaching me that there is so much more I have not seen; and that I do not yet understand.

12,000 miles away (as the 747 flies) sleeps a child.
He will never know what he has taught me.
What I so easily forget, in my pride.

And that is…
To remain curious for much longer.
To admit that others can see what I cannot.
To recognise that What-I-Think-I-Know is such a tiny understanding…
in this great big universe of ‘Yet More Wonders’.