"We children lie out of worry that we will be punished, and you adults... how can you lie like that for fun? Even about the smallest things?" Questions like this are the moments that bring to me the extraordinary need, in this life experience, to understand: why, my dear, when we are children we are so direct, full of color and truth, and then, as we grow up, we lose our uniqueness and try to become one? Why the hell can't we remain interesting and real people? Well, the girl who asked the question that started my writing today is right. Children usually lie out of fear of punishment. It is a momentary, instinctive, almost transparent lie. While we adults, often, lie out of fear of confrontation. Perhaps not to avoid an immediate reprimand, but to maintain an image, a status, an internal balance that has become necessary for us. Thus, an invisible transition occurs: from immediate sincerity to stable conformism. The adult learns to adapt, not to stand out, not to disrupt the general rhythm. Often, without realizing it, we lose the unique within us, we begin to live more as part of a unison than as a separate voice. Children still have this “dangerous ease”. They do not yet know that they must be careful with emotions, thoughts, and words. And perhaps that is precisely why they are more real. They do not filter life to make it acceptable; they live it as it comes to them. In developmental psychology, Jean Piaget describes this period as a stage where thought is not yet hardened by the logical structures of adults. Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, suggested to us the concept of the “transitional space”. According to him, the child does not live only in the external reality or only in the internal world, but creates an “intermediate space” where play, imagination and the first symbolic objects are born, such as toys, a favorite blanket, an imaginary friend. This space is fundamental for creativity and the ability to live a healthy emotional life. Well, it seems that this is exactly the case. A child can invent a story from nothing, laugh at something that we adults do not even notice, build a new world in a shoebox... And we see him, calmly that he is dealing with something, we do not ask him or ourselves whether this is serious or useful. He is simply living. He is creating. He is expanding reality without limiting it. Until we lose childhood, slowly, without noticing, in the way we begin to see the world. Over time, the ability to imagine and dare to create is replaced by something else: rules, evaluation according to expectations, social role. Thus begins (already earlier and earlier) a silent process, where man begins to learn not how he is, but how he should be. Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this construction of "social masks",and it often seems to me that we all start wearing these masks without understanding exactly when the transition occurs. I would have continued this writing I started a few days ago differently, if today Dion's prayer to rejoice in the joy of the one who would win the race had not thrown me into this other branch of thought. Children also have a skill that we adults are slowly losing: they rejoice in the joy of others without analyzing, comparing, or weighing it. In developmental psychology, this is related to spontaneous empathy, which researchers like Martin Hoffman have described as purest in childhood, before social comparison and the experience of competition intervene. We grow up and this skill also begins to fade.
Are we becoming worse? Maybe not, we simply become more cautious, more protected, more accustomed to the boundaries that society itself sets.
But how do we do it?
There may be many ways, but today this simple thought occurred to me: maybe it's not always us adults or parents who have to teach children how to live. Sometimes (not infrequently in my experience) it's children who remind us how to live. They are also our most honest reminder of what life looks like, when we're not yet used to making it complicated.
