We’ve all seen the bumper sticker that says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!” Paying attention, in this case, means paying attention to social media, politics, and the 24-hour news cycle. The slogan implies that there is something inherently moral about paying attention to those things which results in our necessary and righteous anger. I’m not going to argue that there aren’t things worth being angry about. This world is a fallen place, and our aversion to unjust wars and our concern for the plight of the poor, etc, I think, are from God. However, what we pay attention to needs balance. In a recent episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being, children’s author Kate DiCamillo gives us one alternative: to occasionally pay attention to the world the way children do.
Tippett begins the episode: “Each and every adult listening to me right now is a former eight-year-old — wide open with yearning and possibility; understanding exactly how troubled the adults around you are, even if they think they are hiding it from you; almost unbearably alert to the world’s wonders and its dangers all at once.”
DiCamillo often speaks of how the eight-year-old in her is easy to access (“right at the surface”) and how it is that eight-year-old who helps guide her through her stories. She goes on to say that paying attention to the world from that point of view can help us experience a “feeling of wonder and amazement.” She continues:
If you walk through a neighborhood with a kid or a toddler, it’s just like, wait! Everything is fascinating. And I don’t want to let that go, because that’s a great gift. I had a friend in elementary school, Cathy Lord, and I just loved her. She would sit at the back of the classroom and she would ask to sharpen her pencil like every three minutes, because what she wanted to do was look at what everybody was doing. I think about her when I sit down to write. I think: be like Cathy Lord on the way to the pencil sharpener. I mean, everything that everybody was doing was fascinating to her. And that is a way to be in the world. You let your guard down that way, if you’re just curious and filled with wonder.
Tippett asks Dicamillo to reconcile living in wonder “with living in a world in a lot of reasonable despair,” as her books are written with a sense of awe coupled with “clear-eyed realism about how complicated, difficult, often impossible, and devastating life can be.” DiCamillo says that synthesizing “the terror with the wonder and the joy” grounds and comforts her. When we go through times when terror or sadness or other onerous feelings threaten to overwhelm our day-to-day life, finding and appreciating wonder and joy can feel impossible.
Between 2016-2018, I found myself barely able to read anything but middle grade and picture books. I was going through the drawn out dissolution of my first marriage, and my usual book preferences fell flat. Most adult fiction felt too cerebral or concerned with secondary matters, theology felt too theoretical, and other adult non-fiction felt entirely beside the point. When you go through something emotionally difficult and draining, and all your coping mechanisms fail, you want nothing more than to have someone acknowledge your pain, and tell you that you’ll eventually be okay. Children’s books are good at that. I mostly read books by authors I did or could have read when I was a kid (Louise Fitzhugh, Katherine Paterson, Daniel Pinkwater, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, E.L. Konigsberg, etc.) but I read a few contemporary writers too, and Kate DiCamillo was my favorite.
I first read one of her longer books (Raymie Nightingale) in the fall of 2016. I had previously read a few installments of Mercy Watson and Bink & Gollie to my daughter, and liked them, but I loved Raymie Nightingale. The book is about 10-year-old Raymie Clarke, who enters the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition (this kind of comic detail is a common thread in her books) hoping that it will result in having her picture in the paper for winning, thus getting her father, who recently left her and her mother, to return. Abandonment is a recurring theme in DiCamillo’s work, and one that helps to make her work as indiscriminately relatable as it is. Most of us have either felt abandoned, or have a deep-seated fear of being abandoned. Raymie eventually realizes her plan isn’t going to work. That there’s nothing she can do to get her dad to come back. Having this kind of relinquishment expressed from a child’s point of view brought the point home to me in a way that wouldn’t have been possible from an adult’s “I’ve got this” kind of perspective. I needed to see from behind a child’s eyes to where God was the only one big enough to help.
In the fall of 2018, I brought my (then 5-year-old) daughter to a reading DiCamillo was giving to coincide with the release of a companion book to Raymie Nightingale, called Louisiana’s Way Home. After the reading, there was a signing line, and I snapped a few photos of my daughter with DiCamillo. It was a fitting cap to that particular time of struggle: the writer whose books helped me get through, smiling alongside the little girl I had to get through it for. Louisiana’s Way Home ends with Louisiana writing to her grandmother who raised her up to the age of 12, before abandoning her, saying:
I have respected your wishes. I have not come searching for you, but I have crossed the Florida-Georgia state line many, many times since we last spoke, and I look for you every time I cross over. I know that you will not be there, but I look anyway.
And I dream about you.
In my dream, you are standing in front of the vending machine from the Good Night, Sleep Tight, and you are smiling at me, using all of your teeth. You say, ‘Select anything you want, darling. Provisions have been made. Provisions have been made.
This is a picture of God’s providence. When our lives feel like they’re falling apart, and things are so dark that we can’t even see a tunnel ahead of us, much less a light at the end of one, provisions have still been made. It probably won’t be miraculous in the way that manna from heaven was (we’d likely just complain about it like the Israelites if it were, anyway), it’ll most likely come through ordinary means, and we might not recognize them as provisions in the moment. God used children’s books to help get me through, but I didn’t realize that until well after the fact.
It’s only by dying to ourselves that we can get back to a child-like faith, back to a helplessness that can help us to see the world and its creator with the wonder we’re made to. Synthesizing “the terror with the wonder and the joy” sounds a lot like the Christian faith to me.
COMMENTS
5 responses to “Viewing the World With the Eyes of an Eight-Year-Old”
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Wowzas. Love this on so many levels. First, because, of course, Kate DiCamillo—her books amazed me when I was eight, and still do. We need an annotated Mockingbird list of recommended KD reading. And Cathy Lord at the pencil sharpener! That’s something to keep in mind.
But also, Joey, your own story here is so powerful. Thanks for sharing. I love this line: “It was a fitting cap to that particular time of struggle: the writer whose books helped me get through, smiling alongside the little girl I had to get through it for.”
Thanks, CJ!
Very much yes! Many years ago, when I was 24 and going through a difficult time, I used to occasionally browse in my city’s children’s bookstore for the deep sense of calm it gave me. On a whim I purchased two small books by Jan Ormerod, “Sunshine” and “Moonlight”. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that these two little books saved my life—or at least preserved my sanity and sense of hope during a very dark period.
Now — three children and five grandchildren later, I still regularly turn to children’s literature. I’m currently reading “The Wind in the Willows” for the manyth time.
A friend of mine (herself an author) coined the term “bibliotherapy.” It works!
My favorite fiction book ever is a children’s book, “Millions”by Frank Cottrell Boyce. I’ve
read it so many times that I can recite parts of it by heart. Grieving, goodness, wonder,
and hope all seen through the eyes of a child.
@Eliza, I finally got a hold of “Sunshine” and “Moonlight.” They’re both beautiful. Thank you for the recommendation!
@Victoria, I loved “Millions” when I read it 15+ years ago. Liked the movie a lot too.