Arts

How I Started to Think Like A Child.

And how children learn to function as grown ups.

This is the third entry in a dialogue about Alison Gopnik's new book, The Philosophical Baby, between Gopnik and Annie Murphy Paul. Read the first entry here and the second entry here.

Dear Alison,

Believe me, the jealousy flows both ways. As I write this, I’m tuned in to Gus’s monitor again, alert for the sound (and it’s not always laughter) that means his nap, and my writing time, is over for the day. And what are these “blogs” and “movies” you speak of?

I love your idea that “traveling puts you in the same situation as a baby.” When our older son Teddy was seven months old, my husband and I took him along on a trip to Amsterdam. Walking around on our first day, with Teddy suspended in a Bjorn, he and I wore the same expression of slack-jawed wonder as we encountered one new and riveting sight after another: the mossy houseboats moored in the canals, the riotous colors of the cut flowers in the street market, the indecipherable signs and the natives speaking an unintelligible tongue. I recall joking that Teddy, with his enthusiastic babbling, was as adept as I was at speaking Dutch (maybe more so, since he had greater success in getting the attention of waitresses and shop clerks). After an hour or two of sightseeing, the baby and I were both ready to retire to the hotel for a nap.

It’s true, too, what you say about being “hyper-conscious at the same time that you fall apart practically” in a foreign country—there are so many vivid details to notice when you’re traveling, and so many maps and sweaters and sunglasses to misplace as a result. I remember losing my Amsterdam guidebook in a bookstore and being forced to ask the clerk if he’d seen a book around anywhere. Perhaps I’ll be more sympathetic the next time Teddy comes home from preschool without his lunchbox or his raincoat: for a child, as for a traveler, the world is just too interesting to worry about keeping track of your accessories.

That jaunt to the Netherlands three years ago was my most recent foreign trip, but meditation—at least the on-the-fly, grab-a-moment kind—is a part of my everyday life. It’s funny: I’d always imagined that meditation was aimed at attaining the wisdom of a grizzled, wizened old yogi. I’d never thought about it as achieving the openness of a wide-eyed baby. Like the character in the movie Benjamin Button, perhaps meditation makes us grow younger, shedding our adult tendencies to focus and plan and execute. In any case, the practice of meditation is a humbling reminder of how ingrained these mental habits become with age, and how difficult they are to turn off. I remember hearing once that a legal education both “sharpens and narrows the mind” (a remark that I’ve often used to tease my law-professor husband), and it seems that maturity does the same to all of us grown-ups, with both gain and loss for the way we experience the world.

I wonder if it would be possible to cultivate a more fluid boundary between the child and the adult modes of consciousness—to manage our everyday lives with the capacities we’ve developed as grown ups, but to enter that lantern-like state of full awareness as often as we can. You remark that raising children can be “a way of vicariously capturing the wide experience of childhood,” and just this morning I saw what you meant. Gus and I were on a blanket under a tree, lying side-by-side, looking up: at the pale undersides of the leaves, the filtered rays of sunlight, the glimpses of blue in the gaps between the branches. For a long while, time seemed to soften and slow, and I felt I was seeing the world as he sees it.

Tags: alison gopnik, the philosophical baby

Annie Murphy Paul is at work on a book about changing social and scientific notions of pregnancy.

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