"I Dont' Know -- We Didn't Get It Yet"

Creative Commons/Flickr

When I spoke to my grandson Rowen on the phone yesterday, he was with his dad getting pizza.  Making conversation, I asked him, “What are you getting on your pizza?”  There was silence.  Hoping to prompt him a bit more, I asked, “Are you getting pepperoni?”  His response: “I don’t know – we didn’t get it yet.”

I chuckled at the literal truth of his statement and we were off to other 4-year-old conversational topics, like why it wouldn’t be good to let Sidney the Mighty Huntress of the Night (our shared black cat) eat the birds outside my window.

But reflecting back, what strikes me about Rowen’s very clear understanding of what he does and does not know is the child’s motif of living in the present.

How old are we when we start predicting outcomes?  When expectations become the norm?  When failed expectations equate to failed realities in our minds?

It seems the by the age of 5, we humans are pretty good at predicting outcomes.  DELL

But that’s not the same as creating expectations.  Rowen was unwilling or unable to speculate that because he usually had pepperoni on his pizza’s that he would this time as well.  He was simply content to wait until he saw the pizza to ‘know’ what this pizza would be about.

When do we stop being content to live in the Land of Not Knowing, the land that might just as well be named the Land of Simply Being?

Of course, we have to make predictions, operate on assumptions based on past experience in order to operate in this world.

But we also have to allow room to be surprised, to be content to not know what comes next with any real certainty, to be surprised and delighted every time pepperoni comes our way.