Treat everyone like children, especially yourself
The powerful lesson I learned, listening to my friend speak to his daughter
Sitting in the kitchen, I’m trying to read an email while listening to my best friend on the phone. At first, I try to ignore it, but then I realize a growing sensation of annoyance bubbling up in my body. I look up from my laptop, and listen more attentively.
“Who the hell is he talking to so cheerfully? What is going on here?!”
A few moments later, I realize that he’s on the phone with his 9 year old daughter in Bangkok.
I smile.
He’s an awesome dad. He really is.
Good thing he’s not talking to an adult this way, or I’d be pissed.
Why?
Because he rarely talks to any adults this way (including me).
He’s so engaging, encouraging, excited, loving and fun. He’s the best dad a little girl could ask for. Completely different from his usual adult dealing self.
None of the slightly removed, sometimes absent-minded, cynical, critical, grim looking dude I know and love, yet often still get annoyed with.
Not that he’s always cynical and critical with me. He’s been my biggest supporter since the day we started working together 17 years ago. I wouldn't be where I am in life without his help. He’s the co-host of my personal podcast for God’s sake. He’s awesome, fun, thoughtful, creative, adventurous, and very hardworking. But he’s also very hard to read, and incredibly hard to reach sometimes (emotionally speaking).
He is the guy in the zoom meeting that will be camera-off, mute, and when prompted to speak, will say one word before awkwardly disappearing back to silence, making everyone wonder if his internet connection just dropped, if he’ll say more if they just patiently wait, or if he’s really pissed at someone and about to quit.
Definitely not the same guy I was listening to on that call, who was loudly announcing that he can’t believe the story his daughter was telling him about school today. Giggling, shouting and laughing with her, encouraging and cheering her on for the rest of her day, and her current challenges and doubts.
He’s not alone of course. Most of us are more gentle, more loving, more present, as well as more encouraging, more excited and fun, with our own children than we are with a bunch of co-working adults.
Seems appropriate, right?
But does it have to be this way?
Deep down, we’re all still children.
No matter how adult you think you are, you’re human, and within that limitation: a cosmic child.
Even if we don’t consider our universal insignificance, and our human limitations, we can see our obvious immaturity in our daily life, and our emotional outbursts.
When we forget the narrative that we know a lot, that we have experience, that we have obtained some status as “adults” who know how life works and how things “should be”, we can look in the mirror and clearly see the little insecure babies that we all still are.
If you look at life through the lens of childlike immaturity and insecurity, a lot of the human drama becomes easier to comprehend.
My 75 year old grandfather wouldn’t speak to his eldest son, for the final years of his life, for an absolutely trivial reason. Lying in his hospital bed, being visited by the son that had fallen from grace, he would turn around in his bed in order not to face him in his final hours.
Does that sound like a wise old man, or like a stubborn and hurt little child to you?
Does it sound familiar at all?
Drama like this makes sense on a playground. You don’t play with the kid that’s mean to you. But between family members?
It takes humility to acknowledge our own immaturity. How insecure we still feel. How puny our little bit of wisdom and intelligence is compared to the bigger mysteries surrounding us. But accepting all these truths would also enable us to treat each other, and ourselves, with greater grace.
So what’s stopping us?
Nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves. The narratives we buy into. A perspective. How we choose to see the world and each other.
Listening to my best friend being incredibly beautiful to his daughter made me very hopeful. We all can be so much more open-hearted.
If there is a version of us that can treat children this way, we can learn to treat everyone this way. We just have to see the world, and ourselves, in a different light.
Father Zossima, one of my favorite characters of Dostoyevsky’s amazing book The Brothers Karamazov, at one point teaches his young spiritual student that the world would be a better place if we all treated everyone like children, especially ourselves.
To do that would mean to treat people with a tender and open heart. To see the best in everyone, to see possibilities, to sense potential, to recognize sensitivity and acknowledge youth (humans only live to be 80 years old on average, that’s a laughably short time, from a cosmic perspective).
To treat others like children would mean to love people, and sense their hearts over their pretended personas.
To treat ourselves like children would mean to be more gentle, more attentive, more forgiving, more patient with who we are, and more encouraging and believing in who we still might become one day despite all our shortcomings.
We can recognize that our weaknesses, fears and insecurities, aren’t enemies to be destroyed, but inner children that need to be raised and loved.
Let’s be more playful, more open-hearted, more encouraging and loving with each other and ourselves.
Let’s treat everyone like children and see how our world transforms.