Children are Curious| Daily Meditation March 31, 2021

Today’s Quotation:

Children are curious and are risk-takers. They have lots of courage.  They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.-John Bradshaw

Today’s Meditation:

Wouldn’t it be great to continue to have these kinds of qualities?  Wouldn’t it be great to live life like it’s a great adventure full of wonderful and potentially dangerous things, but trusting that life will take care of us?  The processes of life are very important to us, and we learn very little if we don’t trust those processes.  Some things take much longer than we think they should, and we try to hurry the processes along on our schedule instead of on life’s schedule.

If we trusted the processes more, we’d have more courage.  We wouldn’t see the risks as these immense, terrible obstacles that hold us back; instead, we’d be able to face them knowing that life was behind us, and that no matter what the outcome, we’d learn and grow from our experience.

Somehow as we grow and we gain more “knowledge,” we lose our curiosity.  We take things for granted, and we stop taking risks because we think we know all that we need to know.  But when we act this way, we’ve stopped living and we’ve begun existing.  There’s too much in this world for us to ignore it and stop learning from it, but we somehow like our comfort zones more than we like the possibility of taking important risks.

I have to remind myself constantly:  trust life.  As I remind myself more, it becomes more natural to me, but I still have to force myself to do some things that seem to be outside of my comfort areas.  My goal is to get back to a point at which I do things because they’re outside of my comfort area, and that will be a very good point to reach.  Because then I’ll be able to relate much more easily to the kids who are our best teachers.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Are you as much of a risk-taker now as you were when you
were a kid?  What’s changed to make the difference?

2.  In your experience, do people who take realistic risks tend to succeed or fail at what they do?  How do they feel about themselves afterwards?

3.  Why is it difficult to trust life sometimes?

For further thought:

If children are to keep alive their inborn sense of wonder, they need the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with them the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.