I had an interesting encounter when I went shopping today. A young child, maybe three years, shopping alongside their mother; walked up to me with a bottle of water and asked me to open it for them. She was not hindered by her mother’s presence or seeking a strangers help.
As I reflected, this thought came to mind “a child does not see every stranger as a threat, because their experience has not captured this.” You can call it the innocence of childhood, but it is the one thing we appear to lose as we get older. Children do not assume negative outcomes before their encounters hence they operate with a boldness hard to define.
Unfortunately, as we grow up, we lose the joy of childhood because our lives are now shaped through a multitude of experiences. Past disappointments have made us more suspicious of every new encounter, past lies have made every new truth harder to believe, and past losses made it harder to receive new things: gifts, people and relationships.
Everything we hear, is therefore interpreted through layers of our pain and experiences. Sometimes, we interpret to the point of misinterpretation. We make assumptions about people, and in our pride, live in those assumptions as a reality. Perhaps, it’s time to review the lens through which we look at life to check if it is word compliant.
#sly
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