A Child's Belief

My little girl  at the beach / photo by Fyfe Photography

Today, I was watching my four year old son jumping off of the bottom few steps of our hallway stairs. He had a look of fierce concentration on his face, and when he landed, he would break out into a huge smile and then go back to the stairs and jump all over again.

I asked him what he was doing, and he answered me, "I'm Batman, and I'm flying!" Then he walked into the living room with me, moved his little stool over to me and said, "Watch!"  And he climbed up on the stool and leaped off it, lifting his legs high and throwing his hands in the air while he was airborne.

"See, Mommy! I flew!"

He beamed at me, proud if his accomplishment and I was reminded of my childhood self, doing the same thing. I had jumped off from my couch, over and over. And every time I lifted into the air, for those few precious seconds before I landed again, I felt like I was flying and I believed that, if I found the right way to jump, I could make myself remain in the air for longer and longer amounts of time. I truly believed, at that young age, that I could fly.

When do we grow too old to believe we can achieve the impossible? As children, we believed that we could do anything and that nothing was impossible, but as we grow older, we start to lose this belief. We lose our belief in the magic of possibilities and we lose our belief in our ability to do amazing things. It's those people who somehow manage to hang on to their childlike belief in the impossible who are able to achieve great things.

Children enjoy trying to achieve the impossible and believing that it can happen; they know that this trying and believing is all part of the fun. We should all hang on to that knowledge.

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