When We Let Young Children Lead

One of the reasons I'm inspired by working with young people is that they lack a deep sense of "pastness," largely because they have so little individualized past to sense. As older humans, our birthday evokes and includes every birthday we've ever experienced, but for a two-year-old this birthday is the birthday. This leaf is the leaf. This puddle is the puddle.

I feel privileged to be with them as they begin the lifelong process of creating a past that will be stored in memory and referred to -- consciously or unconsciously -- for the rest of their lives as episodes in the story of what they know, how they feel, what they expect, and, most importantly, who they are.

Some philosophers, like John Locke, believed that memories constitute our personal identity, our consciousness. More contemporary thinkers and scientific researchers tend to believe there is more to identity than "pastness" alone, but no one doubts that memory is a vital aspect of what we call our selves. For one thing, our memories are the only evidence we have that we are continuious beings that have existed and will exist (fingers crossed) in the future. It's in memory that we store our ideas of our personality, abilities, and flaws. Without memory, we wouldn't know that we can succeed or fail; what and who we love and what and who we hate; what we crave and what we fear. Memory is, in many ways, who we are, and for many of us, memory can be a kind of trap.

In her novel An Accidental Man, one of her characters insists, "I've told you I'm not a continuous being. My words cannot be used as evidence against me." It strikes me that this is the state in which we find very young humans, neither defined nor trapped by anything that has gone on in the past. After all, they are babies. Their entire life is about growth and change. Their bodies, their brains, their emotions are, from one day to the next, discontinuous, a series of not necessarily connected presents. As adult outsiders looking in, we of course can't help but find threads connecting their past with their present. It's what we've learned to do to make sense of the world. But for these young children, there simply isn't enough past in their lives to provide evidence of continuity. In other words, they are being born anew with each experience of themselves in the world.

These young humans are relentlessly living in the present because, for them, there is very little evidence of the past and none of the future. This is what inspires me. When I'm with them, I'm privileged, when I let them lead, to be free of the cage of my past as I'm down there on the floor, eye-to-eye, shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing breath, as our heads press together over whatever mote that has, right now, sparked our mutual curiosity.

"I understand that forgetting can also be incredibly dangerous," writes Kate Eichhorn, author of the book The End of Forgetting, "But there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation." Her point is not that we should try to somehow stuff our bad memories, but rather that a normal part of personal and social growth involves more forgetting than most of us realize. Today, however, we live in an era in which forgetting is becoming increasingly difficult. Youthful indiscretions, mistakes, and embarrassments live on the internet forever, which leads more and more of us to pre-edit ourselves in order to craft the story we want told about ourselves, rather than, you know, just living.

And "just living," for me, means these moments during which I can escape into the present alongside my young guides who understand what the physicists know: the past and future are illusions. Existence, in reality, is neither continuous nor discontinuous, but rather an ever-emerging now.

In another of Murdoch's novels, The Flight from the Enchanter, a brother advises his sibling, "Live in the moment, Sis. And remember, you're the person who decides how long the present is."

This is the lesson I learn when I drop to my knees and let young children take the lead: this leaf is the leaf.

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