I wonder if we ever notice how different children are from an adults. At least, when it comes down to space, it is easier to notice the difference: children’s body proportions, with their big heads and shorter limbs, are different to ours, so it is easy to conclude that their experience of space in a different from ours (let alone their different sleep and energy consumption patterns… it is the age of discovery).
But such difference is more subtle when it comes down to time. Time for a child must also be different from adults’; it is popular wisdom that some minutes of pain can be an unending hell for a child (for example, waiting at the school gates to be picked up), while some minutes of an amusing activity are blissful beyond any definition. Children dwell the present to such an extent that the definition of “present” no longer makes sense: a child, second by second, is what he does (more about children’s metamorphic powers here).
Told like that, it all sounds a bit theoretical (time is always a tricky issue). So this time I’m going to switch to nostalgia mode and show three childhood experiences in which I had, either as a child or looking back many years later, a glimpse of the weird, changing nature of time.
- “Stupid things recorded by us”: the title left no place to doubt, and in fact it was quite accurate. It was a home record made by my brothers and me (my dad appears, too) many years ago. I recently listened to it again, and it was basically a collection of clumsy sentences, imitation of TV conductors, and many background noises from which you could guess the struggle of several children making trying to grab the microphone. You can feel in the background the excitation, that impressing seriousness that children apply to all their games. And yet, there are not many sentences, and the whole thing lasts no more than 2 minutes. But the fact of having the cassette entitled shows that it was considered a profound and long accomplishment, and I’m sure that in those moments we thought we had been talking for a really long time.
- The hypothetical meadow: One day, an unknown woman came into the class and asked us all to make a drawing, which of course we all eagerly did. She then collected all of them and said something about a contest. It surely was some kind of promotion by an insurance company. Later, on the weekend, my parents and I went to a place where all the pictures were exposed in the wall, the kids received promotional gifts like cool crayons, and I guess the parents should have information too. When I arrived there, I was asked to explain some featuring about my drawing, so that we could located it. I instantly said that it had “a huge meadow, with lots of green”.
It took us some time to locate it. The “huge meadow” in fact turned out to be a three square centimeters area somewhere in the middle of the page. Only after I saw it I remembered that drawing a huge meadow was my first intention, but coloring was SOOO boring that I changed my mind on the go and drew other things. But the coloring moment lasted for so long, that I assumed that the meadow would also be enormous. - “Twitterized” epic: School again. I was ten year old. After the huge success among both public and critics of my first composition -about a child who was turned into a tree, which was then transformed into a table, but he was alright with his destiny(!)-, I issued my most ambitious work to date: the breathtaking story of a climber who faced the savage forces of nature on his way, all alone, to the highest peak in the world. I cannot tell that it was a failure, but the results were certainly far from my expectations, and for many years I wondered why was that: my history had all the elements to become a major success: action, foreign lands, self-discovery, drama… (well, it had no sex because at that time I did not know what was that…). The re-reading in the XXIst century has given me important clues: only ten lines of handwriting in an A2 paper separate the bottom of the adventure from the end at the top. But it took me years to write those lines, so I assumed that everything was there, even if a bit condensed, maybe.
Time is not linear. I like to think of it as an expanding circle in which we are the center. What I mean by that is that we all can learn from the child we were, in those moments when we don’t have the blessing of having one of them around. Of course it is the adult’s job to help children to socialize, but I think (and already told it) that the learning process must work on both directions. Children are very close to the source of mystery, because being born (coming out of nothing) is just as mysterious as dying (returning to that same nothing). I see in many adults this sad, simplistic conception of “the child is all wrong and I have to fix it”. When your only advantage is that you came first.
I don’t know. Discussing time always takes you to very profound thoughts. Common life, existence, is a a paradox, a miracle. We are living an everyday miracle. Let’s help each other, no matter our age, to understand that miracle.
Well, at this moment I feel a bit like the grandpa telling his World War adventures, so please join in. Do you remember any strange experience with time as a child? Any moment that seemed to last forever or was irrationally short? Do you have kids? What have you learned from them?
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Learning postural health from children
Life right after removing the wrapper
Notions of photography
Experiences in Fatherhood
The cliff metaphor
