I don’t want to be a panda

Photo by Pascal Müller on Unsplash

Every day on our way from school, I ask my kids a question “What one new thing did you learn today?”

You see we have a deal with my kids. They need to teach me at least one new thing every day. So I asked the same question the other day.

My daughter said “Today we learnt that pandas are going extinct”.

I said “I see. What is the lesson here?”

She said “I don’t want to be a panda”. This is one of the things I admire about kids. They tell like it is.

Of course, we should care about pandas. Based on Wikipedia, fortunately, pandas are not extinct any longer.

But the lesson here is much deeper. At our core, we as humans want to belong. We want to matter. We want to put a ding in the universe.