Shrinkage

“What a compassionate solution,” I thought to myself while conversing with my friend. I had no idea how we might solve the problem in front of us, but this man, quite my senior, not only solved the problem, but did so in a way that showed compassion and caring for everyone affected by it.

I have the fortunate opportunity to be involved with a number of people who are considerably older than I, and am consistently astonished by their capacity to pull from their unique experiences and knowledge, in order to offer solutions to any number of problems that I’m personally stymied to resolve. Ironically, I have that same experience when I’m involved with the youngest part of our society. Although children can’t pull from years of experience like our seniors, they replace that with an uncluttered view of life that lends itself to solving what seem like complex problems, with simple solutions.

Although these two segments of our community come at things with wildly different mindsets it seems to me that they share a very common thread. They each inherently speak from their mind and their heart at the same time, as if there is no separation between the two. There is no need to reconcile between a thought and a feeling; they are intertwined to the point that there is no distinction.

With children we usually explain this away as immaturity, but if the most experienced people gravitate back to this oneness of heart and mind, this kind of response can’t be appropriate.

We have all heard young children make suggestions that in their purity will indeed solve a particular problem, if it were not for our grown-up view on the implications of the solution. “It will be too hard,” “Some people may not like it,” or “It’s more complicated than that,” are all things I’ve heard myself think or say. I wonder what my friend would say. I bet he would be much more in their camp than in mine.

So, maybe it is me, or our period in life. The innocence and purity of childhood too often gets buried as the commerce of our lives becomes a focus. We have responsibilities, jobs, homework, and chores to fill up our days. We exercise our mind constantly to the point where it starts to believe that it’s an independent organ strong enough to survive on its own. If we forget to exercise our heart, it becomes overshadowed by the strength of our mind, distant and eventually cold.

As an infant we are just tiny little creatures, and as a result our heart and mind are physically close to each other. As we grow from infant, to child, and then on to adulthood, our mind and heart become physically separated by a greater and greater distance. Maybe that’s why as we move into our senior years we start to shrink, so that like a child, our mind and heart are nearer each other, intertwined as it was intended.