Your Inner Child

Ever watch a child dance, eat, play or do just about anything? Most of the time, in young children, there is a freedom associated with everything they do. They don’t care who’s watching, what people think, or the consequences of any of their actions. They just worry about one thing in life and that is to do whatever it is they are doing right then in that moment without judgments of any kind. What freedom!

But when does that stop? Our first day of school? When we turn 13? Does the process of editing start the first time our parents say “no”? One of the best skiers I know, John Egan, was asked once -- after flying down a mountain like nothing I had ever seen before -- how he’s able to do it? He said, “My parents never said no”. The great painter Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”. Michelangelo said in his late years, “I am still learning”. It seems as though there’s a pattern. To succeed, we must find the balance of living our lives in society, conforming to the constraints and responsibilities of life, and yet live it in the most childlike innocence possible. If we would start to look at life through the eyes of a child, nothing would be impossible, we could do anything. There would be no judgment, either of ourselves or from others, and we would enjoy each moment in the present.

I’m telling you it’s possible. It’s a personal decision we can each make.

A centurion woman once said, “Nothing I ever worried about or stressed over, ever amounted to anything”. The test in life is to get to the end and look back and smile and be able to tell ourselves we did it, and we did it right. If we could figure out how to reintegrate a childlike exuberance into our daily life, we would begin to look at problems, not as problems, but as opportunities to become better people. Many of us have lost that child we once were; we call it growing up, becoming adults, but with each day we adhere to that old way of thinking, we become less and less open to the possibilities that lie just outside our own little bubble. What if in one little way, each day, instead of placing judgment on a situation, we opened ourselves up to the possibilities in life like a child? What if we didn’t worry about what others think of us or if we are doing it right? What if we danced like nobody was watching? What if we just focused on the single task of accomplishing the thing we started just for the sake of doing it; no agenda, just to do it? I dare say we might, as adults learn to think more like a child, to see the world for what it is, a place where anything is possible, a place where, in that process, greatness and personal peace is achieved.