You can sit your kids down to watch what you think is the greatest movie of all time, and they’ll get bored and fall asleep. You can get floor seats to an NBA game and they’ll roll their eyes. You can introduce them to your fanciest, most important friends and they’ll want to go back to whatever they were doing before you called them over.
It’s almost a rule that kids don’t care about what you really, really want them to care about. And yet, there is something about kids that also seems to resemble that hilarious line from Homer Simpson. “I’m not easily impressed,” he tells Mr. Burns as they’re driving. Then he looks out the window and shouts, “Whoa! A blue car!”
Your kids might not understand how expensive those floor seats were, but they love that there is free popcorn. They might not appreciate that classic movie, but they can also play in the dirt with rapt presence for three hours. They don’t care about your billionaire boss, but they think Grandma and Grandpa are the two coolest people in the entire world. Whether they admit it or not, they think you are cool. That’s why they copy you, that’s why they want to put on your shoes, that’s why the t-shirt you gave them from when you were young is the one they love to sleep in every night.
Kids aren’t easily impressed, and yet somehow they are. It’s really that they see through most of the constructs us adults have taken for granted. They can naturally do what Marcus Aurelius practices in Meditations, the art of stripping things of the “legend that encrusts them.” Meanwhile, they also see simple, ordinary things for all the wonder and beauty that the rest of us miss. They see how little most things matter, and see how much other things do.
And in this we can learn a great deal from them.
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