Like, to you or me, someone might say "the whole wide world" and in our minds we might picture a spherical blue-green object tumbling through space with hundreds of countries and billions of people all making up governments and countries, all with their own laws and systems and histories. A kid, though, thinks of his two best friends and all the houses up to the end of the block. Maybe a grocery store. And that's the whole wide world.

 

Now, to you or me, we talk about the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, or the signing of the Magna Carta, or the birth of Christ, and we imagine all of the hundreds or thousands of years between then and now, and all the complexities of the events and what led up to them and the consequences that followed, and it just boggles the mind. A kid just thinks "yesterday".

 

It's like they live on this little disproportianate scale where all of time and space is just "today, in the house that I live in". It's ironic that these things, to us, seem vast and unknowable, but to kids they're all just that simple. And I say that sincerely, although I'm not one of those touchy-feely New-Age psychobabble freaks who think that kids (or dolphins or retarded people) are superior to us because we lack the ability to define ourselves in terms this simple. Because things are not always that simple, and I frankly I was proud the day that I realized that the universe extended beyond just whatever room I happened to be in at the time. This was, like, last week.

 

But I'm getting off-topic.

 

Now, to kids, these big things, like  time and space, are really small. And yet other things, things that might seem small and inconsequential to us, are earth-shattering to kids. For instance, when I reach into a box of cookies and I take out one that's broken, I hardly ever freak out and start crying because I wanted a whole cookie. When I watch the end of an episode of The Incredible Hulk, where he's wandering down the road with a bag slung over his shoulder while the dinkly piano music plays, it doesn't really affect me anymore. When someone calls me a name, I don't push them down or go tell on them. And it takes more to make me happy than a new Scooby Doo cartoon.

 

It's all alien to us, naturally, even if we have kids. Even though we were all once kids and did and thought all the same exact things, we don't remember what it felt like. When you're a kid, life is fair and the world is a wonderful place and everyone shares and loves. When you're an adult, life isn't fair and the world sucks and is full of rat bastards.

 

Say when you're six, you take an empty box and fill the bottom with dirt and plant some apple seeds in it and imagine that one day you'll have apple trees coming up through the floor of your room and you'll be able to reach up and pick one whenever you feel like it. As insane as it is to think that this would work, let alone to want even one tree growing up through the floor of your house, to a kid, this is an awesome idea.

 

And then you get to be, say, 30, and you see a little apple box, or maybe a tree, and you think about that little box-garden you made when you were six. And then it's like everything stops and your mind goes back not just to that dirt garden, but to a time when you were stupid enough to think it would work, when your parents and your older sisters totally took care of you, and you had no reposibility and you fell asleep on the couch watching Space: 1999 and got up early to eat Froot Loops. And it's like your life is a piece of paper folded in half so that both these moments, the one where you're 30 and the one where you're six, touch each other perfectly. Kind of like Quantum Leap.

 

C.S. Lewis said that this was JOY, and it wasn't that kids were the only ones who could experience it, but that kids lived it, on this vast and unexplored continent, but that we as adults only sailed between small islands of it.

 

Anyway this is what I think. I'm going to bed now.