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The Wisdom of Five
What if children are the sages we try to return to as adults?
When I was about five, I’d sit in front of a mirror and stare at myself. Stare and stare and stare at a small brunette body sitting on the floor in front of a full-length mirror that ran the length of a bedroom door. I focused on myself unblinkingly, until I hit a daze-y, hazy state, and felt a lift-off, a separation that took me from inhabiting my body to being on the outside and observing.
My bedroom carpet was shag, in a two-tone pink: magenta and rose. There was a cherry tree outside the window. The closet occupied one side of my room and was kept shut because my grandmother’s Russian Orthodox icon was in there, and I had a nightmare about it one night.
It was 1968. The citizens of the world were shaking things up, but I was in my little five-year-old world of contemplation.
Don’t ask me what possessed my bike-riding, tomboy self to get existential, but my guess is that a lot of children have this soft opening, untouched by a hardened shell of self-consciousness; maybe a five-year-old is more naturally intimate with universal mysteries, before life piles on a series of programmatic and defensive thought-habits.
This was also decades before computers, social media, endless streaming entertainment, video games. All we had were outdoors, books, a couple of TV shows, and for me, the quiet of my bedroom — the space to develop solitude and a rich internal life. I had my own room, and I loved it. I loved being in my pink-carpeted sanctuary, flipping the pages of my latest Dr. Seuss book, and staring into a mirror, wondering what the hell . . . I was.
Here’s what I remember from the mirror-staring time — two main hits:
1. Observing myself — or really this corporeal presence that was holding the seeming consciousness of “me”. I observed it with a neutrality that I now, 50 years later, have to remind myself to hold when I’m in my challenging moments or moods. I watched and watched this reflection, floating above myself until I got freaked out by the indefiniteness of things. Before returning to myself, the internal commentary was along the lines of: “Hmmmmm.”
