Big little kids

by Daniel Wirz

A child’s journey into life begins at birth. Its parents take on a challenging task. Through their guidance and emotional interaction with them – and later with other people – the child learns to develop its own individual way of tackling life’s tasks with confidence and increasing responsibility.
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“An infinite space is the cradle,” Friedrich Schiller once mused.
  Anyone who speaks like that must have realised – if only for a moment – something about the incredible size of small children.
  I once came home quite exhausted after a long day’s work. Lara, only a few months old at the time, greeted me joyfully. I give myself a jolt (actually I feel exhausted), take her in my arms and decide to take her for a little walk in the nearby woods.
  She is very quiet. Listens, looks at what’s there. Devout. She is simply there. Completely present. She – and me?
  After a short while, I realise that something of her being fully there has unexpectedly passed over to me. My tiredness has vanished. I feel fresh and awake – completely present. And the greatest thing: I feel a peace within me that I have never experienced before. I am, we are peace. Only this. Nothing else. And that is all.
  I gratefully accepted what the moment gave me. And as if out of the blue, a few words come to mind, words that – in wise foreboding! – had accompanied me for many years of my life as a father. Only now did they come true, and I suddenly realised what Rudolf Steiner meant when he once said:
  “A small child – that is the greatest possible revelation of what the world is”.
  Dear readers, I hope that you, too, are able to find that stillness from time to time, to open yourself to whatever wants to enter us.  •