The child in you

Warning, this post is also suitable for nonpregnant men.

Often we hear people talk about the child in you. What are the qualities of a child that makes him or her so endearing to us grown-ups? Cute. Innocent. Inquisitiveness. Playful. Full of energy. Pure.

Some people have extraordinary memory for certain events that happened in their lives. Like the title character in the movie, the Big Fish, I was born under extraordinary circumstances. I had refused stubbornly to be pulled out by the good doctor, away from my previous world, a world where dreams are created. As soon as he got me out, I jumped off his hands and slipped out of the room and bowled my way to the elevator doors, flipping doctors and nurses aside like pinballs. My daring escape was short-lived as I was soon stopped by a tall, good-looking man who called himself Pa.

Pa loved to drive me and my younger sis around in his car. Sometimes he trusted me with the wheels. One time he tried to fool me by taking me in grandpa's car and passing by the roadside Indian street-peddler twice - once in my dream and once in my conscious state. He did that deliberately to test whether I still remember the nature of the worlds, that in fact dreams and realities are inseparable like identical twins. That is, if you recognize both of them in the first place. Hah, as if I have forgotten where I came from.

So I grew into my pre-teen years and decided to eat lots of green beans to make sure that my fantasy girl would not be taller than me. My efforts paid off as I shot up from being the second shortest kid to being the second tallest kid in my class in less than a year. Needless to say, she took notice of me.

Much of my life as a youth and young adult was also very interesting. For instance, I attempted to prove the existence of God by using the method of calculus. Although I got a divide by zero in my calculations, that did not discouraged me from my quest for the truth. I used the power of my imagination to take me to places so far away that traveling by earthly means is next to impossible.

Of all the characters I met, the most special one must be the fisherman. Not only is he larger than life, he is also larger than what I can fit into one post, much less a paragraph. Perhaps the best advice I got from him was not to be fooled by what I saw on the surface. To prove the point to me, he showed me how he communicated with a bee using simple hand gestures. It seemed the bee must have mistaken him for a bee. Some giant bee.

When I look back, I discover that life can be seen from a different perspective. You can see it through the eyes of a child and make your world a wonderful place to live in. Let the child in you show you how. If you have forgotten how, let the children teach you.