Easley Escapade #6

At the Easley Center on Thursday I mostly spent my time tutoring and getting to know the kids I was tutoring.  There was one little boy in particular who was six years old, just in the first grade, and he asked me for help with his homework fifteen minutes before my shift was up.  I agreed to help him because he was working on learning to write/spell out basic words, so I figured it wouldn't take terribly long.  As we worked through the assignment, he would point to the picture, say what it was rather enthusiastically (apple!), then start to spell it.  After each letter he looked up at me for approval and once I nodded or said, "Yes, that's right," he would beam with pride and carefully draw the letter in the oversized blank (with dashes in the middle to distinguish upper case from lower case, of course).  Sometimes he would look up and say questioningly, "t?" (or whatever letter it was), searching my face for an answer with his large brown eyes.  I would either commend him or make the sound of the letter it was supposed to be ("puh, puh, puh, puh, puh"), and then he would say, a little more confidently, "p?!" and I would reply with a yes or a no, providing him with more clues if necessary.

He was an adorable little boy, but all I could think the whole time was that he was at the beginning of his life, and there was no telling where it would go.  Really, there never is any way to know how anyone's life will go.  And for a moment, his innocent joy seemed indescribably sad to me, because I knew that someday someone would try to take that away from him, and they might be successful, and he would know that for the rest of his life he would have to watch out for himself, perhaps by himself.

But each time he smiled at me I couldn't help but think that his joy was a beautiful gift to all those around him, and that for a little while, his zest for learning for the pure sake of knowing would inspire, encourage, and bring joy to everyone he meets.  So perhaps that childlike innocence; that love for life, every moment of it; becoming excited over the smallest of things, is really a blessing meant for us adults in the world.  Maybe, instead of feeling the need to educate the child and bring them back to "reality," we should take the opportunity to remember what that felt like and enjoy that sweet innocence that lasts for that short period of time.  The adults may be here to help the children grow up, but the children are here to remind the grown ups what life was like in the beginning, what it was meant to be, and that sometimes you can beam with joy over learning something simple, like how to write the word "apple."