Childlike Wonder
This past week, I recently started working at a local daycare here in Newberg. I’ve held numerous childcare jobs before; in an after-care program at an elementary school, at a “Kids Klub”, as well as partaking in an overwhelming amount of babysitting. Perhaps my inclination towards children is partially spurred on by my usually negative interactions with senior citizens; despite my best efforts to be friendly, I usually come away from an encounter with them, feeling like a millennial nuisance.
There has always been something about a child’s wondrous mind and curiosity that intrigues me. At what point do we lose this ability to be in awe of the smallest insect, a cardboard box, or a fort made of pillows and blankets? Or maybe it’s not lost, but rather lays dormant somewhere buried deep within, underneath other’s expectations of us, social cues, and how we have been taught to think and behave.
Regardless of the child’s age who I am interacting with, it never fails to “bring me back down to earth”, and usually everything that I have been stressing out about seems much more trivial. By looking at the world through their lens, all at once it becomes so much easier to find beauty and excitement in things that I don’t often give more than a second thought throughout the course of my day.
On Tuesday night, I attended LIBA Plenary, much to my dismay. Once the speaker began talking, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself listening to someone who verbalized many thoughts that I had had before. We were being encouraged to be innovators, think more creatively, and to embrace, rather than shun, failure. These are traits not often discussed in a classroom (in my experience), but I think that more focus should be placed upon them. At some point during his speech, he discussed an experiment that was done involving business school graduates and schoolchildren, which was conducted by Tom Wujec.
The experiment was to consist of various materials; 20 sticks of spaghetti, one-yard tape, one-yard string, and one marshmallow. The goal: build the highest freestanding structure, in an eighteen minute time frame. Wujec found from this experiment that among the groups of individuals who attempted to perform this task, business school graduates performed badly, consistently. In stark contrast, a group that continued to do well, time after time, was that of recent Kindergarten graduates.
While the business school graduates spent a majority of time trying to plan out every aspect of their project, the kindergartners went straight to work, jumping right into the unknown. It is this absence of fear that I believe leads to their success; they have not learned to have an inclination towards doubt or hesitancy. As shown through this experiment, there is a lot that we can learn from young children, and probably far much more than we realize.
I truly believe that everybody’s happiness and success would grow if we could all take a few minutes of our day to slow down and attempt to view things from a child’s perspective. People often say that our life is not about the end result, but rather the journey along the way. Perhaps by looking for joy in small, everyday objects or interactions, we will find more of value by the end of our “journey” than we could ever anticipate.