Life Size

When you are born, your world is small. Small eyes. Small ears. Small face brushing against your small blanket.

As you start to learn, your world grows. It gets filled with images and sounds and discoveries. Stuff reveals itself to you, like unfurling flowers with intoxicating scents. At first, the stuff you learn is mostly small stuff, like dropping your ball makes it fall to the floor. Like, if you fall down, it hurts.

Then you start learning ideas. Counting to 10. ABCs. How to turn on an iPad and get it to do things. This is stuff the older kids and adults know. Addition and subtraction. Reading out loud.

The world keeps getting bigger as you make new discoveries and learn new things. There are whole new worlds to discover. Worlds in books. In movies. In nature. In the stars.

You discover there are all types of people, all manner of characters, and they sport different faces and speak different languages. They have histories and hopes and fears. Some are funny. Some are scary.

Oh, and there’s money, which seems to be the world within the world, and the things money can buy and the things that you can’t have if you don’t have the money to buy them.

Oh, what a complex place this is, this world.

And then something happens. Your life stops becoming larger. Somewhere along the way, you went from accumulating your experience to maintaining your experience. This change may coincide with the time your body stops growing, or a little before, or a little later. This is the time when you know your world around you. You recognize its features, its familiar rhythms, the people who populate it. You know where you fit. And that’s not for nothing! Knowing where you fit is a reassuring feeling. It’s a feeling that you can’t help but want to hold tight. You want to preserve it. To protect it. To maintain it. Your life is about maintaining.

But life offers a cruel twist: the world keeps changing, whether you want it to or not. And that means, if you’re trying to maintain your experience, the task of maintaining your experience never ends. And sometimes it’s hard to maintain. Sometimes you have to expend a lot of energy just to keep things the way they are. And sometimes people seem to disrupt your task of maintaining your world the way you like it. And perhaps you become just a little resentful of these people. Perhaps you begin regarding people as either helpful to your world or harmful. And once you begin seeing people that way, that can be a difficult sight to unsee.

So what’s the lesson? The lesson is, if your world isn’t getting bigger, it’s getting smaller.

Keep making your world bigger.