“Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking up uninteresting explanations!”
-Digory, The Magician's Nephew.
When I was living in Sydney on my working holiday, my roommate was a writer who had briefly worked as a war reporter during the early days of the Iraq war.
One night, I opened up to him about my writing, admitting to him that I was "blocked." This conversation occurred at 2:00 in the morning, riding a tram back from a night out.
We stumbled off, a few blocks from home. He proceeded to show me his "unblocking" technique by dragging me into the middle of the street and making me lay down. He did the same. It wasn't long before a car was honking at us. He stood up, laughing.
“Whenever I'm feeling stuck in my writing, mate" he drawled “I like to shake myself out of it by doing something stupid.”
**I feel that I should add a disclaimer here: DO NOT lay down on a busy street at 2:00 a.m. That is an incredibly stupid thing to do. We could have been run over if the driver who honked at us wasn't paying attention. I wouldn't do it again.**
The lesson I took from it, what I advocate for and try to keep alive in my life and writing, is that childishness > adultishness. Embracing childishness has been one of my best methods for increasing happiness and contentment.
In John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden, he addresses one of the biggest challenges a human being faces when growing up: the moment when you realize your parents have no qualifications other than strictly biological.
“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
In other words, at some point in our young lives, we realize that adults are full of crap.
Somewhere along the line, instead of taking the lesson and growing up to be better, most of us grow up to be adults who are full of crap.
Carl Sagan famously said that if you're looking for scientists, go to any elementary school classroom in the country.
Childishness has inherent curiosity and doesn't take its beliefs too seriously.
This is why I like talking to small children more than I like talking to 80% of adults. It's why I went into education. A child might be convinced beyond all doubt that bananas can fly, but upon experimentation (that has made a horrible mess), a child will change their worldview.
It's why kids are so cute. Their statements, though naive, reveal that they live in a world full of endless possibilities. An ever-changing world that has nuances and things waiting to be discovered.
“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'
I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland.
Adult beliefs, on the other hand, are solid. They have unchanging rigidity. An adult can be convinced that vaccines cause autism in the face of all solid evidence.
Adult beliefs bend the world to accommodate the self. Children's beliefs bend to accommodate the world.
Yet adults dare to pass their beliefs off to children as some sort of gospel.
I've written before about belief. Beliefs are the sum total of your experiences, plus whatever has brought you positive reinforcement, minus whatever has brought you negative reinforcement. Beliefs are a personal experience of the world.
The beauty of childishness is that you get to experience the world in your own way. Without dogma.
As a kid, I tried to fly so many times. I believed that if I just tried hard enough, jumped off the right vantage point, said the right words, I would take off. Once I had tried a few hundred times, I changed my beliefs. But what if I could fly? And I didn't find the right combination?
Sometimes I ask myself questions like that as an adult, as an exercise in keeping childishness alive.
We observe as children that are adults are just people, that they've ceased to have imagination, and we then start choosing the miserable unimaginative adult existence in favor of the childish one that we already have.
The world of unlimited possibility where you can fly if you just find the right combination is much more beautiful than the world of impossibility.
There is hope. The inner child can be revived, and all it takes is curiosity for the sake of curiosity.
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
-Dorothy Parker.
If you want to introduce childlike joy back into your life, start doing things that you are curious about, which may seem pointless from an outsider's perspective. Take a step back from obsessive achievement, and go answer a question for yourself simply because you're curious about it (and no, googling things doesn't count).
Here's what I did when I was feeling stressed and blocked in my writing last week: I left my phone at home and went and found some ants. When was the last time you looked at ants?! Ants are awesome.
There’s an obsessive logical order to an anthill that you can't find in the human world. Unprecedented cooperation.
Yesterday, I spent an hour looking at a flower bed full of bees. I came away with a renewed appreciation for the beauty of the world, and a feeling of serenity.
The more possibility that there is in the world, the more life is worth living. The more you believe in possibility, the more potential there is for happiness and contentment.
Reawaken the inner child. You can do this by exploring, or even just taking a different route home from work. The inner child is key to contentment, and it does not do well with rigidity.
Allow yourself to play, and step away from your rigid plans for success for a little while. Make a collage from old thrift-store picture books. Watch an anthill. Just give yourself permission to step away from ambition, if just for a few moments.
Share this post