Why is it that some people are more successful than others? How is it that two business people can have the same experience and education yet one earns twice as much as the other? How is it that some people have such serenity and peace of mind in their lives and others don’t? How is it that two identical twins, with the same character and raised in the same environment, achieve different results in life?
The difference in your success or happiness lies in how you view life. It lies in the questions you ask yourself. Most people want the answers about the short term, the now. But life’s most precious gifts come to us in our most uncanny experiences. The most telling answers are in the experiences which don’t have the answers right in front of us. When they aren’t clear, or when they’ll somehow come to us later.
One thing is for sure, the questions and the pictures which we hold constantly in our mind are how we view our world and what the world gives back to us. If we try to always look for the good and for the truth in every situation, it is only then that we can dream big dreams. Dreaming and believing are essential to achieving our desires.
Albert Einstein was one of the greatest thinkers of our time. As a child in school, his teachers saw him as a hapless dreamer who didn’t stay the course of the curriculum. His thinking was way “out of the box” compared to what everyone else was thinking. Only a few years after he left school, Einstein won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Theory of Relativity. He was seen as a dreamer who didn’t stay the common course like most people. Albert Einstein was a dreamer, and he believed in miracles.
Successful people are also Blue Sky thinkers. Yes, they see the reality of things. They see the clouds however; they also know that behind every storm are the impending calm, the sunshine, and the clear skies. Blue Sky thinkers see the homeless, they see the hungry children, and they see man’s inhumanity to man. But they also see solutions and possibilities. A Blue Sky thinker realizes that when you focus on the darkness, that’s what you get…more darkness. You see the negative, the fear, and the anxiety. But when you look toward the light and focus on the good, the beauty of things comes to you and you arrive at solutions.
Life is a process of learning, unlearning, and, relearning the essentials of life. Observe children up to age eight or nine. They are like little sponges, taking in so much and asking a zillion questions. They touch, they taste, they listen, they smell and they ask. And they ask again. They use all of their senses to perceive. They want to know why. They want to know how. Children will persevere and follow up tirelessly when they want to know something. They never even entertain the idea of being put off.
Childlike discovery of the world is not a finite stage of life. To be childlike in the discovery of our world is a natural process. A gift we’re born with that we never lose. Each one of us has this beautiful gift within us that is only affected by our environment and our thoughts. There is no mechanism inside of us that says, “stop asking why” or “It’s time to stop touching that, tasting that, seeing or hearing that”.
Our parents did the best they could. In order to protect us, adults tell us “don’t do that, or don’t touch that”. Our minds and our environment tell us to stop asking, to stop touching, to stop perceiving. But we never lose this gift. We only unlearn it because we stopped exercising it. I promise you that we’ve never lost our childlike gifts; we’ve only unlearned them.
Eventually children stop probing for answers. They stop testing and they stop asking. They begin to unlearn that state of curiosity. But it never leaves us. The beauty of this all is that we can relearn it! You can teach anyone new tricks of they are willing to learn. Many older people realize this and begin the process all over again. Remember meeting an older person who seems to have so much curiosity. They want to learn again as if they didn’t get their fill when they were younger.
Is it possible for everyone, with the exception of some disabled people, to get to that childlike state again? Can anyone regain that childlike state which is full of wonder and possibilities? Yes! We can relearn that state of mind that is so full of discovery, so full of questions about everything in this beautiful world. It is possible to be innocent and child-like again and to see the world through the same eyes as when we were children.
To be innocent and childlike (not childish) doesn’t mean to be immature or naïve, nor does it mean to be in a state of denial. Yes, there is ugliness in the world and there’s the reality of things. But there’s also the good and the beautiful. It’s our choice which one to focus on. Remember reading about Anne Frank, the little Jewish girl who wrote of all the hardship and tragedy she witnessed during the Holocaust? She said, “in spite of everything that’s happened I believe that people are basically good”.
Always keep the child in you young and innocent and question everything. Don’t ever get comfortable. Be a non-conformist. You can be more than what you are today. Children demonstrate an infinite thirst for expression. They become bottomless containers for the truth, for answers. They probe endlessly as if the truth can never be realized. As soon as they uncover a truth, their spirits fly to a new dimension, a new piece of the puzzle. It’s a delight to remain childlike in our view of the world.
To remain childlike is to remain open, trusting and diligent. It is to remain open to the newness of people, places and things. It means to think broader pictures than we’ve thought before and to create the wonderful and beautiful pictures in our minds about our world. To be childlike is to never, ever be satisfied. It’s about wanting more and about becoming more. In the end, this life is all about the essentials. It’s about who we are, what we have and how we are able to give.