Childlike

Today I sat with a five-year-old boy under an open sky.

It was just the two of us on the school oval. I watched him as he rolled and tumbled forward, as if the world spun with him. He crawled beneath soccer nets, dodging imaginary lasers and enemy ninjas. He flung his arms, leapt over tree roots, shouted moves from Ninjago, and declared with full authority that the entire world was under his protection.

In that moment, I stopped being his psychologist.

I was simply a bystander in the realm of a child’s imagination. Watching a boy so at home in his body, so sure of his mission, so utterly and beautifully oblivious of how he looked to the world.

I then asked myself quietly:

When did we lose this?

This freedom, this joy.

This wild, unruly courage to imagine without shame. To run like we were saving something. To speak as if our words shaped the sky. To believe that our hands could move mountains. Somewhere along the way, we seemed to have traded that in. Perhaps not all at once, no. But slowly, in tiny, incremental exchanges.

“Sit still.”

“Act your age.”

“That’s not how the world works.”

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Somewhere between innocence and knowing better, we buried our wonder, and called it maturity.

We psychologists call it “developmentally appropriate”; others might simply call it “maturity”.

But what if it was just a case of forgetting?

Forgetting that we used to dream without needing them to make sense. Forgetting that we used to want without fear of failure. Forgetting that we used to imagine without permission, from the world, from “common sense”.

Would our dreams be different if we remembered what it felt like to run barefoot into them?

Would we have chosen the same life, the same path, had we let that childlike instinct guide us again?

I’m not quite sure.

But maybe wonder isn’t something we truly outgrow. Perhaps it is just something that we outpace.

Maybe behind the grown-up words, the grown-up roles, wonder lingers ever so quietly;

waiting for us to slow down long enough to remember.

To remember how it felt to believe that anything is possible.

To believe that you were born with something special.

To believe that even on an ordinary Tuesday,

You could be the one to save the world.