As a rule, I don’t publish my family life or very personal information on the internet, but tonight my daughter amazed me in a way that I have never been before. In fact I learned more about my own thought process and how to foster the strength in the minds of our children tonight than I ever thought possible.
My daughter asked me tonight about the “cycle of life” then proceeded to explain to me how she sees the world and the “cycle of human life” Her words. She explained a combined description of mainstream religion and theories of evolution. Then she asked me if she was right, I was in such amazement and asked her where she learned about this. Her answer was that she figured it out and she thinks that this is how the world works.
I then answered her question by explaining how I believe the cycles of life work. I explained to her that energy is life and life is energy and explained to her the big bang theory and how we evolved from pure energy into the human beings we are today. I included theories of my own regarding the extinction of life prior to the ice age and how “life” reformed on the planet. My daughter listened intently obviously understanding much of what I was explaining. When it came to dying I saw no sadness in her eyes, she just looked at me waiting for my explanation.
I explained that when things die they return to their natural state of pure energy and that energy cannot “die” or cease to exist. What it does is joins with other energy to form a new entity retaining some of the memory of what it was before. This memory is what causes evolution and this is why even after the ice age and the “death of cavemen” we still evolved into the human beings that we are now. In essence I explained to my daughter that everything is made up of different forms of energy that merge together to create something/anything and everything.
When it came to explaining the big bang I explained that there was a tiny piece of energy that split into two pieces of energy which in turn split into…so on and so on. Then different pieces of the energy merged together to form amoeba that evolved into small fish like creatures that evolved into larger ones and then developed legs and so on until the ice age. I explained the there are many life cycles that work around each other some take longer to complete than others, some are quick and some are takes years. Some take billions of years.
That was the end of our discussion, I didn’t want to confuse her so at this point I asked her if she understood what I was explaining to her. She answered “yes dad I understand it, it’s kind of like this” she takes the pencil out of my hand that I was using and draws a big circle. In that circle she draws four other circles and draws arrows from each circle to the next.
- In the first circle she draws another circle with a dot in it. “that is a baby in a stomach”
- In the second circle she draws a toddler crawling.
- In the third she draws an adult walking.
- In the fourth she draws an upside down person, explaining that this person is dead.
I asked her what happens when the a person dies. She tells me that you turn into energy and energy can’t die and life is energy it just reforms again and thats why the arrow after death leads to the baby in the stomach. I was BLOWN away by how my daughter looks at the world.
The moral of this story is that children hold the keys to our future and they see the world and everything in it as it is. They aren’t poisoned by the beliefs of others. On this night I vowed to my wife that I will never force my children to believe in what they see and not tell them that they are wrong when they see something for what it is. So when you child is explaining to you how he/she sees something in the world shut up and listen chances are their view is far more pure than ours. Remember you me and the majority of us have suffered years of persecution because of our beliefs while the rest of the world try to force their opinions on us. From our children we will learn to see things more pure if we just get out of their way and let them learn and absorb, if we guide them they will undo the damage we have done and rebuild our world.
Did I forget to mention that she is 7.
