Two Year Old Professor

A child’s laughter lights up a room. It bounces around the walls in a happy vibrant music that stretches smiles across the most hardened of adult faces. It’s a laughter birthed in innocence, produced in grand delight and its delightful sound can disarm and swallow us whole.

You’ve heard this sound. It’s the sound of our children, our nephews and nieces and our grandchildren. It’s the sound of a child emerging from behind his peekaboo fingers to look at the face of a playful adult, cackling in laughter time after time, and we are left to wonder at the child’s remarkable innocence.

There are times I have been certain that the Creator shows us some of the keys in ways that may escape us. Or maybe it seems it escapes me and I catch on late in the game. Tonight I am sitting here thinking about a child’s laughter and innocence, yet also viewing it through the prism of a man in his mid fifties, certain I have witnessed the majority of my earth time. It can be foreboding to know this fact and if I dwell too long in the thought………..but when I think of this remarkable innocence in the children, the innocence that produces that clarion signal of delight embedded in the “there is no tomorrow, only this moment” laughter I see something I have perhaps known but quickly forgot and failed to capture into speech, like a lightning bug that shows us the light for an instant and then is gone. When I have known it, I have not known it very long. And when I knew it perhaps it was as short as the blink of my eye or the time it takes a smile to cross my face and disappear again.

I’m thinking tonight that the Creator wants us to understand that the child’s innocence is pure faith. It is faith perhaps born of ignorance, but faith in the big people that surround them and fascination in the universe that amazes them.

The adults sit and wonder at the child’s ignorance and delight, knowing that too soon these children will know our truth.

As I look at my life and even toward my earthly ending I speculate if this might be one of the signals so easily missed. Is it one of the secrets ignored, stepped over as though it were transparent as we look in our adult wisdom in all the wrong places?

I want to be ignorant. I want to know that tomorrow doesn’t exist and that today is all that I know and will ever know. I want to be a child again.

Any man my age would know this is impossible at 55 years old. We would surely be committed and forced to 24/7 medication procedures.

So I concentrate on a philosophy that suits me. I’m conjuring up my vision of this new-found key. It’s a belief and philosophy that the Creator returns us to childhood when the day arrives for us each. Full circle, if you will allow such eastern expansion of thought.

I gaze out into the darkness of the night sky contemplating the death that will certainly visit me, imagining that maybe the Creator smiles knowing he will return me to childhood. Return me to ignorance and faith that worldly toil, pain and years have concealed from my soul. Consider it a cleansing shower, washing away the world of burden until we are clean enough to laugh in simple uncomplicated delight; a rebirth.

I’m sitting at my computer listening to the sounds of such laughter right now. My grandson will be 2 this weekend and he flew to his Rickpa's house this morning all the way from St. Louis to spend the weekend. He has now made 7 full flight running circles from the living room into my office and past my chair, chasing the family dachshund and cackling with the delight I have attempted to describe. I’m grinning wide at his concert of cascading giggles.

He’s 2 tomorrow, and already he is helping me become ignorant again and filled with faith. Maybe I will not have to wait on the Creator for deliverance. Maybe I will be fully and delightfully ignorant by Monday when he leaves.

Only 2, but he has already taught me so much.

I’m staring out my office window into the dark Texas sky. I have always known my soul is eternal, but now I’m hoping it’s childlike too. If that’s alright with the Creator he may feel free to fill my prescription. I’ll just do my best while here to live in the present and remember how to have faith and to laugh, without 24/7 medication.

Now I Get It.... ...Maybe