The candidness of children can be confounding. Perhaps because out of the mouth of babes come truths that we are too scared to utter; because kids hear and speak the inaudible language of the heart.
Back in school, did you ever do those exercises where the teacher gave children half-finished proverbs and asked them to fill in the blanks? The exercise used to be pretty popular in junior school when I was young. Back then, the good students invariably knew the sayings and filled in the gaps accurately, but even the non-scholars fared all right. Smarty pants all, they rarely did their homework and zoomed through classes on a wing and a prayer. In subjects that demanded rote learning, they didn’t fare particularly well. But wherever logic came into play, their imagination and gift of the gab put their star in the ascendant. In the complete-the-proverb session, they positively shone, with lines that occasionally eclipsed the original.
Because not only were the made-up lines pithier, they were also more straightforward and solution-oriented. Consider these examples: Don’t bite the hand that... looks dirty; A miss is as good as a... Mister; Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and... you have to blow your nose; When the blind leadeth the blind... get out of the way.
I’ve spent the last fortnight working on a project with children, and I can’t stop marveling at their ingenuity. Asked how their city could improve, all the children, from age six to 16, lost no time in zeroing in on the deficiencies and spelling out actionable steps. Not for them any request for repeating the question, or tempering of words. Like a dog with a bone, they peeled away the layers surrounding the issues, picked out the kernel of truth and held it up for us to see and understand.
We adults complicate things. When faced with a complex subject, we gravitate toward the details and lose sight of the big picture. Children, on the other hand, focus solely on the problem at hand and offer straightforward solutions. Yes, they may oversimplify the situation sometimes, but they force you to confront a reality you would rather avoid, see truths you’d rather not see. They don’t fall back on excuses of ‘we must be practical’; they don’t let hurdles slow down their dreams. They ruthlessly cut through clutter the way farmers slash vines in a field that’s been neglected too long.
We talk about children being wise beyond their years. We are wrong. We should talk about adults being not half as wise as kids.
Leo Tolstoy got the message back in 1885, when he wrote a short story called Wisdom of Children, where the adults kept fighting about an issue involving two little girls long after the girls had forgotten the fight and gone out to play with each other again. Pablo Picasso said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. It would be a shame if we let it take us that long to understand and hold onto our children’s way of perceiving the world around them.
shampa@newindianexpress.com