Was I older than this?
Was I older than this?
Here's the memory
I’m under the kitchen table of my family's home. There are the legs and feet of four adults, eight legs in all, who are sitting in chairs around me, talking to each other. The floor is smooth and cool, made of black and white checkerboard tiles. I am very happy, playing with a new rattle with a bright red ball inside.
Then the momentous occurs.
I try to stand up, and I can’t.
This does not frighten me. I become downright elated. I’m overjoyed!
I know that I can’t stand because I have grown too tall to fit under the table without crouching.
When I was trying to choose a memory to write about for #silverbloggers current contest, this one came to mind right away. At first, I thought this event too dull for a post. Then I looked up what age I must have been, and it all got far more interesting.
This memory is more vivid than any other of my childhood memories. I remember how I felt, that the floor was smooth and cool, what color things were, and that I felt very safe. I know I was under a table that was seated with four adults two of whom were my mother and father, and playing with a new toy. I am inestimably joyous. But most curiously, I fully understood that I was growing, and had finally grown too tall to stand under that particular table.
How old must one be to have such a sophisticated understanding of the concept of growth? I wondered. To find out, I got out a tape measure and measured the distance from the floor to the underside of the kitchen table I am sitting at right now.
29 inches.
I then searched for a growth chart. When I found out the age at which a female child is 29 inches tall on average, I was shocked – less than 15 months!
Allowing for the fact that I am a diminutive person now, and may have been as a baby, I could stretch that a bit. Perhaps I was fully 15 months, still a baby, not yet a toddler.
I knew about happiness, I knew about smoothness and newness and babies and tables and adults gabbing around a kitchen table. I understood numbers. I knew enough about those things then, for this memory to be crystal clear now, nearly 65 years later.
Here is a picture of me at 17 months, a good two months after this earliest memory!
We think of the very young as un-knowledgeable, empty vessels that need to be filled by the older and more knowledgeable humans in their lives. But perhaps we have got that very wrong. Perhaps those vessels are born filled with innate understandings that we unlearn as we grow older.
As a toddler, I could do algebra that many tenth graders struggle with, gauging my growth as a function of time. No one had to teach me.
As a toddler, I knew texture, temperature, color, distance, and time. No one had to explain these to me.
As a toddler, I knew infinite joy. Happiness and love had not yet been hobbled in me.
Perhaps we vessels are connected to nature's intelligence when we are born, and are torn away from it as we are “taught” or “molded” or “disciplined” or “guided”.
Perhaps we "grown ups" would do better to let our children teach us as they grow, in an un-schooling environment. I think we adults could do with some un-schooling ourselves, or de-schooling. Perhaps we must un-teach ourselves what we have been taught, to know the world as we did when we were first born, before various slave systems imposed themselves on us.
In so doing, I believe we could connect to our true selves, and fully experience the infinite.
Much love to us all.
