As I look at some of the photos that I took while at one of my weekly visit’s to my town’s nursery school I come to think that these youngster’s are some of the wisest, most honest, brilliant people that I have ever met. (But that may be partly because I cannot understand most of what they say). They are also some of the luckiest people I have ever met. Their lives at the nursery are so much fun. They have really good lunches and they spend a lot of quality times with friends. They even got to pick all the sweet potatoes in the nursery’s own patch! There were huge sweet potatoes. That was fun. Their only troubles are when they bump their over-sized heads on things like other over-sized heads or the floor and sometimes I think they are feel alienated from each other. They may not have realized yet that the world doesn’t revolve around them. (The irony is that once you have realized this you must once again see that in some ways the world does revolve around you because your world is you). I wish I could show people how great it is to partially, if not fully, enter the world of these people. Let’s just say that the simplicity and sincerity is very refreshing. Seeing them every week means that I can never really have a bad week.
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True, kids are great creatures, in ways untainted by the fears that govern the life of many adults. To quote Jesus: "let the children come unto me. Do not stop them for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these". (Mark 10:14). Rosana, a Spanish folk-pop singer also talks about this in one of her songs :
"Sin miedo lo malo se nos va volviendo bueno/las manos se nos llenan de deseos/si somos como ninos/sin miedo a la ternura/sin miedo a ser feliz"
(Without fear bad things start becoming good/our hands are filled with wishes/if we are like children/without fear of tenderness/without fear of being happy).
Things, however, are not always as rose-coloured as that. Flashback to a nursery school I used to work in, where my job was not so much teaching as it was crowd control. These kids were vicious. Cute, and great in many respects, but in many ways also the epitome of uncontrolled human instinct. It was almost like being trapped in a Freudian id joke.
Children's emotions are completely unrestrained. If they love you, they will hug you and kiss you and tell you so. This is even more refreshing when you consider that in this particular culture repression will be beaten into them soon enough. Unfortunately, the same unrestrainment that made these loveable snotballs so cute also goes for their darker sides, which were usually manifested in the form of hard wooden bowling pins being hurled across the air and the odd nosebleed. (What did my Japanese co-teachers do in these instances? Fret and utter mild tut-tuts).
With age comes self-consciousness, which will hopefully allow us to understand others. Like you said, the world does in a way revolve around us, because we are its architects. Innocence is valuable, but it can also be dangerous. Jesus celebrates the selflessness of children (hence the Christian dogma of "love thy neighbour"), but Aristotle regards the ideal of eudaimonia -perfect coexistence- as a result of a virtuous life, which must, by definition, come about by virtues other than unconsidered personal action. A wise man may be innocent, but not all innocent men are wise.
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