Monday, May 6, 2024
Recently, I had a group of former students over. We were all sitting around chatting, and I asked one student about what he’d like in his life and he said, rather yearningly, that he just wanted to be a kid. Jake wanted to do what his spirit wanted to do – to explore, to get into adventures, to create, to just mess around, and to be free.
I have a lot of faith in that “kid.” Of all of them, he has the most potential. Most of us would dismiss someone like that, saying that they weren’t responsible, and that they would simply be pissing their life away, wanting to mess around like a kid. But I say explore, play, and be free! That’s what’s really at the heart of all of us, so why not just live with abandon? Otherwise, you’ll kill your spirit.
If you look around, we’re a bunch of miserable “adults” who have built imposing structures in our lives that make living into a total drag. We’ve structurilized, sterilized, formalized, and stripped the very essence of life out of everything we do. The essence of life is freedom!
At the heart of every matter is a childlike innocence of joy and love. Even the universe itself seems messy. The stars are scattered in the sky “randomly.” The natural world looks like a kid just went berserk with markers, texture, and color. The world is strangely weird and kooky. But to humans, it’s rigid, structured, and often serious and solemn. We’ve taken marriage and turned it into an “institution,” when essentially it’s just two lovebirds expressing sweetness for each other. We’ve taken education and made it so formal, nobody enjoys learning. Learning is fun, but you’d never know it if you walked into a sterile, solemn, and stuffy classroom, today.
If you want a good leader, appoint people like Jake. He totally gets it.