Aspiring as a Little Child

Kids want to feel like grown ups (which is different from being grown ups).  However, this is by no means only children.  Everyone wants to ape those higher up the food chain than themselves.  For children, that just happens to mean grown ups.

Think of how names work, for example.  Anyone who studies name changes over time realizes it works like this.  Rich people get some sort of fashion in names.  A few years later, middle class people start using that name and the rich people stop.  A few years later, working class people start using that name and the middle class people stop.

Little Tommy clumping around in his father’s boots is the very image of some Cockney businessman in the old days trying to talk like a toff (btw, I have heard that the whole aitch-dropping thing was an aristocratic affectation in the 1700s, Scarlet Pimpernel and friends, that eventually worked its way down the social scale to London’s East End).

The difference is that Little Tommy is having a blast, whereas the businessman is in a cold sweat of anxiety.  Not to single out the businessman.  We are all social climbers to some degree, we all come to adulthood still not fully formed and try out new things that we think are neat and valuable but that we aren’t good at yet.  We all do those new things either anxiously or with the smug, fatuous reverence of “look at me, I am doing something important.”

Maybe we need to aspire more to become like little children.  Not to be like little children but to become like little children.  In other words, to become the same way that little children become.

Children do not really have an authentic self.  They are in the process of growing up.  Same with you.  But what children do is they enjoy the process of growing up.  They don’t rush the process.

Perhaps, next time you try to ape, relish it instead of rushing it.  Its all the rushers, the people who are anxious and artificial and grim, who cause all this status churn because the people who already do the high status thing don’t want to be associated with the rushers–who can blame them?–so they have to move on to something else.