Kids (Especially) Need to Believe

Children start off with an innate belief in magic. They see the things that their parents have generally forgotten how to see. Children look at the world with wonder in their eyes, and they see wonder everywhere. Nature is alive and magical to them.

As we grow up, we tend to stop believing in “childish” things. We take a more and more rationalistic view of our world, and our society encourages us to do so. As we grow older we become more jaded to beauty and wonder, and we too often lose the ability to see those things at all. Our world stops being alive, and fills with inanimate objects.

As a shamanic practitioner and a parent, I have tried to keep my children connected to nature and to wonder. Some of their favorite “treasures,” as they call them, are the interesting rocks they find outside. They’ll watch, fascinated, as a spider spins a web. When they wake to frost on the grass later into spring they’ll joke about that “mischievous Jack Frost.” It isn’t that they imagine some character running around overnight spraying frost around, but they see their world as alive.

I can’t help but contrast that to children who grow up getting nothing but scientific explanations of things from the start. To children whose toys play by themselves, moving and speaking in computerized voices using fixed dialog.

I watch my children bring their Lego creations to life, enacting scenes sown from their own imaginations. I’ve sat with other children whose imaginations were already dying. Where a doll could only be Snow White because that was the last movie the girl had watched. And I could only be the Queen in the little girl’s playing, because who else would Snow White talk to other than the Dwarves?

If we can’t imagine things, then how can we innovate? If we can’t look at the world with a sense of wonder, the world goes from being full of life to full of things. If we are only surrounded by unliving, inanimate objects, we ourselves become less alive.

Belief is about being able to have confidence in an idea without having proof. It requires imagination. The less alive our imaginations are, the less ability we have to believe. If everything in our lives is cause-and-effect, if everything has a rational explanation that can be empirically proven, we don’t learn how to believe in things without proof.

Isn’t hope basically the belief that good things will happen? Can we have hope without belief? Otherwise all we have is a theory that good things can happen because we’ve seen them happen before. But we also see bad things happen. If we only have empirical evidence to work with then we have to acknowledge that any action might have a positive or a negative result. While that is true, it means we can’t simply choose to believe that good will come out of our actions. We can’t hope. Being without hope is hopelessness–a powerful word and a dreadful way to live.

You can choose to live with imagination and belief and hope and live in a world where good, wonderful and magical things happen. Or you can choose to live a jaded life of hard, cold fact, where there is no magic, no wonder, no hope or excitement. One of those choices is being alive. The other is existing. Which do you choose?