The Little Teachers

A few weeks ago, I wasn’t doing well. I wasn’t unwell physically, no, but it was the kind of internal “not well” that shows up through the body. I’ve always known that when my skin breaks out, it’s rarely about skincare. It’s my inner turmoil bubbling to the surface, my body whispering that something inside me is unsettled.

Work was heavy. Life felt dense. My mind kept looping through deadlines, decisions, finances. And in the middle of all that heaviness, it was just me at home with my daughter.

She came up to me holding her fish plushie. The zipper had broken clean off. I braced myself for a meltdown. Took a deep breath to prepare myself to fix it. Instead, she held up the torn piece, her eyes shining.

“Look! The broken part looks like a small dragon. The smallest dragon in the world! And it’s so cute!”

And I just… smiled. I couldn’t help it. Because where I saw a problem, she saw a possibility. Where I anticipated frustration, she found whimsy.

A few days later, I brought her swimming. I was sitting by the pool crocheting. She splashed around for awhile, then suddenly ran up to me with a tiny leaf cupped in her palms.

“Look, I found a baby leaf! Please take care of the baby for me,” she said as she placed it gently on the table in front of me. Then she kept returning, each time with a bigger leaf.

“This is the mother leaf.”

“This is the father leaf.”

By the time she climbed out of the pool and was done swimming, she had adopted an entire family of leaves. She insisted on bringing them home and asked me to crochet a tiny “house” for them. She placed them in front of the TV and watched a show with them, narrating the plot to them like they were alive and listening.

As adults, we’re so conditioned to panic when things fall apart. Something breaks, and immediately we slip into stress, disappointment, control. But here was this tiny human, treating a broken zipper like a mythical creature visiting her afternoon. Treating fallen leaves like they were her long lost friends. And I thought: When did we lose this? This ability to look at the world and see magic?

Children have this beautiful ability to breathe spirit into everything they touch. Even a puddle can become an ocean. Or the living room, a kingdom. Nothing is inert. Nothing is boring. Nothing is ever “just” anything. Their mind is a universe still expanding, unburdened by logic and untouched by cynicism. They do not care if something is realistic or not, they simply ask “What else could it be?”

What we call “pretend” in children is the closest we can get to divine authorship before adulthood teaches us to shrink. Children are little mystics, investors, cosmologists. They are constantly building and rebuilding the world from scratch every single day.

We used to be just like that, didn’t we? And then we grew up. And somewhere along the way, we surrendered this way of seeing.

We talk so much about how our parents raised us. How our childhood sculpted us, how our foundation was laid without our consent. “My childhood is why I am this way,” adults often say. And that’s true. Childhood leaves fingerprints everywhere. Maybe that’s why our generation is so obsessed with tracing them.

There’s been a huge cultural shift where suddenly everyone is learning the language of trauma, attachment styles, inner-child wounds, and generational patterns. Therapy has turned into a collective education, something we use to decipher who we became and why. We name our wounds, our patterns, and the ways childhood shaped us.

And yes, all of that work matters. It is valid and it is necessary.

And of course, it isn’t only childhood that shapes us. As we grow into adulthood, we inherit the weight of expectations. Suddenly there are bills, deadlines, milestones, performance reviews, societal benchmarks of what “being an adult” should look like. Childhood wounds us in ways we didn’t choose, and adulthood wounds us in ways we’re expected to accept. The world we live in now — fast, demanding, optimised — only rewards productivity.

No wonder we forget how to play. No wonder our imagination fades. No wonder the world starts to feel flat. The world asks us to be efficient, to manage rather than imagine. In a society built on performance, whimsy starts to feel impractical. The seriousness of adulthood is reinforced by the structure of the world we live in.

In trying so hard to meet its demands, we slowly forget that life was ever meant to be anything other than a series of tasks. And when life becomes only tasks, we start believing that healing is a task too. It becomes something to analyse, optimise, or solve.

I’ve noticed that in our urgency to heal, we forget that healing can also come in the form of creation. Adulthood is the first time in your life where you get to choose who you want to become. And part of that authorship is recognising that we are no longer bound to the stories we inherited.

We might not have been able to choose the conditions we were born into, but we can choose what we build from here. And isn’t that the great miracle of growing up? And in this new chapter, something poetic happens: you begin to be raised again, but this time by the smallest, gentlest teachers.

We were shaped by adults when we were young, but now that we are older, we are raised by children. They raise us into wonder. They raise us into presence. They raise us into possibility, into softness, awe, curiosity, imagination and tenderness. Into the version of ourselves we forgot. I’m starting to believe this is how the cycle is meant to be. Sure, not everyone has children, and not everyone feels drawn to them, but all of us, at some point, must return to the parts of ourselves that once saw the world with openness.

Growing older isn’t meant to harden us. It’s meant to bring us back to creativity, to play, to the joy of noticing things we once walked past. We don’t heal by becoming more serious or more controlled. We heal by becoming more permeable, more responsive, more willing to be amazed again.

Perhaps you don’t need a child to teach you this. Because life itself is always trying to; through art, through conversations, through synchronicities, through the people who still hold a spark in their eyes. But children embody it so purely that they remind us what we, too, once carried effortlessly.

To grow older is to grow toward wonder with intention. The child in us was always meant to be met again, this time with consciousness. Healing, after all, is a return to childlikeness. And so every time my daughter holds up a leaf, or a broken zipper, or a tiny “dragon,” I’m reminded that the world is still speaking, softly and playfully, if only I remember how to listen.

Thank you, Aquila, for raising me.