One of the wonderful qualities that most children have is their imagination. They have not yet been told to “be logical”, “back up your statements with proof”, “be serious” or been asked that awful question, “Why don’t you grow up?”

Avoid a terrible fate

While there are times to be responsible, like brushing our teeth and keeping our promises, there has to be a balance or we’re in danger of curmudgeonry. Grandchildren can help us avoid that terrible fate.

Be free

Playing pretend is a freeing game to play with children, or even with those of us just pretending to be adults. Here’s an example that just wrote itself the other morning:

I feel like water in a waterfall, pouring over the rocks to fly free, airborne, knowing I will land softly. I am water, after all, flexible and porous, with my fellow molecules, separating and coming together in an endless flow of movement. I am movement through space and movement in form, from liquid to mist to frozen ice. I am a free life, traveling the planet as the wind or gravity take me…never alone, yet separate in my own smallness. 
I cannot imagine how it is to be caught in a form, like the fish that swim by. Always the same, limited in movement, experiencing something called death, which means a coming apart of these particular molecules and combining with others in a new way and with an actual sense of ending with, perhaps, a new beginning at some other time. Being water, there is no such thing as time; space changes as does form. The variety and limitlessness is my experience of life, of reality. I am spacious and ever changing.

Possibilities

Just let yourself imagine anything and ask a child to join you.  What is it really like to be a rock, a tree, a bird, an island, a king or queen? How different going over a waterfall looks to a drop of water than it would to us, who fear our own deaths. Just taking over a different point of view for a moment or two can expand our awareness of possibilities. 

Tell your stories

Have you ever lived in a different culture from the one you grew up in? Or moved to a different part of the country or new job or met people outside your usual circle, who have very different backgrounds and beliefs? Most of us react to these circumstances by partly longing for the familiar and partly being curious about the differences. We could tell stories about this to our grandchildren, including our own feeling about it.

Change is constant

There is something brave about the fall. In autumn the leaves change color and leave their residence, to which they have been firmly attached. They have their (usually) brief flight, then land on the ground, to begin the next change as they decay.

It is strange how we fear what we call change, never noticing that change is constant, freeing and essential for life. 

Give it a try. Find an imaginary waterfall with a child and jump in!