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Wide-Eyed Wonder
We find it beautiful the wide-eyed wonder a child has for the world. We look at their open face and wish for those days back for ourselves but we stand by and think, unflinchingly, that the world will knock it out of them. That they will go to school and be brainwashed to believe there is a designated place for them and will be knocked into it. They will be molded from elementary schooler, to middle schooler, to high schooler, to graduate.
We know this will happen, and that not everyone fits that mold that the school system forces you into and shaves off the parts of you that squeeze out to make more of you than the plastic doll they try and make you.
We know every child is different but we never think to ask ourselves how much of the child will be left then? How much of that child tried to reach out beyond what society accepted and what was cut off? How much human is there left and how much machine we told them they had to be?
So we look at the wide-eyed child and we wish for that innocence back and for our love of the world but we do nothing to bring it back to their eyes or stop it from leaving.
I know people who are unable to see the way a butterfly instinctively knows how to dry it's wings, that inside some boring grey and brown rocks there are colorful insides, that clouds make weird shapes that sometimes turn into dragons and spaceships and hands and words.
The wonder of the world left them. Punched out of them with every grade and test and project. With every shouting match with their parents because of their futures, every broken sob that their pillow caught because they weren't good enough.
We let children, our own, others, go through this because we know no other way. We subject them to what our parents put us through and we accept the fact that it will happen, that one day they, too, will have lost the wonder of the world. That they won't see the glitter of the sunset on the ocean because they are too busy looking down at their desk, in a cubical for some company, working late and with no windows, waiting and knowing with a calm sense of resignation that the wonder in their child's eyes will leave them, too.
