The Freedom of My Four Year Old
June 12th, 2007 by Ken D
A few weeks ago I went to my nephew’s confirmation. My 4 year old son attended and he doesn’t like loud noise so we brought along hearing protection for him. This protection is the big ‘ear muff’ type and it does a great job in blocking out noise. Usually he’ll wear them and see the noise is not so loud and end up taking them off. Sometimes having them around is enough of a reassurance that he doesn’t use them at all.
Before the service started I looked over and saw him wearing them. Here is this little boy, sitting in a church pew, wearing this ear protection. They are pretty big, and on a child’s head they look huge. (They’re adult size)
As I was looking at him I couldn’t help but smile. He can sit here in church surrounded by so many people and wear those big things on his head and he doesn’t feel self-conscious in the least bit. He doesn’t care what people think. What freedom.
I was relaying this story to a friend of mine yesterday and I realized something that was even more important. It’s not that he doesn’t care what other people think.
It doesn’t even cross his mind that anyone would be thinking about him wearing those things at all.
His mind hasn’t been tainted with that judgment capacity so it doesn’t even register to him that someone would even think something either positive or negative about it. There just is no thought to it at all. He hasn’t developed those self-limiting beliefs that hold us back. He’s wide open - free.
In that freedom is so much power. Imagine what any one of us could achieve if we had no care about how we would look doing it or what other people thought of us. Failure and rejection wouldn’t matter - they wouldn’t even register.
I know I will corrupt him along with others in his life. We have to. It’s how the world is. For him to survive and be successful in this world he will learn things that will take away that freedom he now has. The freedom I now work so hard to achieve.
We all had it in our lives. It was then systematically taken away from us due to the structure of the world we live in. My only hope is after he loses that freedom he will realize he had it, and work on trying to get it back.
It’s what I’m doing now - trying to get that freedom back.
I think it’s what we are all doing to some degree.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Beautiful illustration of the concept of judgment. We DON’T have this as children, and oh if we could hold on to that…
I remember when I was 8 years old, choosing for some reason to wear a red bandana to school tied in a triangle shape over my head - kinda like a peasant woman from times gone past. I remember sitting in assembly, a red-triangled head in a sea of hair… but I don’t recall any other kids saying anything to me at all about it.
When I got home, my Mum saw me, and I remember her gasping in horror and saying ‘I hope you didn’t wear that to school like that!’
It was in that moment that I’d felt like I’d done something ‘wrong’…
And hey, it was only a bandana!
My Mum was embarrassed for me, when I hadn’t been at all.
What intrigues me about this memory though is WHY I wanted to wear that thing…
Much joy,
KL
June 24th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Thanks for the story Kara. I can relate to you making the observation about your mom being embarrassed for you when you hadn’t been at all. I don’t do that with my son because I see that’s what will cause him to become self conscious about it. When we were sitting there at the church I only smiled and admired the state of ‘non caring’ he was in. I wasn’t embarrassed at all.