Where Are You Going? – September 05, 1999
Memories made in early childhood stay with us. They are fixed points of reference throughout our lives: how a beautiful flower smells, the softness of a kitten, the sound of a well-loved voice reading a story. This first, fresh view can color all our later experiences. A wise man wrote, “The web woven around [us] in childhood’s days lasts, and seldom wears threadbare; . . . in many instances it grows brighter and brighter and stronger and stronger.”1 Our first-time wonder at the world can serve as a compass, and those memories can give us valuable direction for where we’re going in life.
The poet William Wordsworth realized the importance of those first impressions when he wrote:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old
The Child is Father of the Man.2
Those first memories of childhood are a “Father” to our later experiences. Our exuberance at age five begins to fill the wellspring of joy where we will drink at fifty-five. Remembering those early feelings of awe and curiosity can shape us as we mature and grow. They can give us direction to the place we are going.
Growing up doesn’t have to be growing away from those feelings. Channing Pollock writes, “Some of us must wish . . . that we could be born old, and grow younger and cleaner and ever simpler and more innocent, until at last, with the [pure] souls of little children, we lay down to eternal sleep.”3
Staying in touch with our childhood wonder can keep our way more simple and innocent even as we become older. This first, fresh view of life is a gift to give us our bearings as we travel through life. One of the most important things we can do is help a child in those first impressionable years to feel love, to have security, and to experience wonder.
Then, with their compass secure, they’ll know where they’re going.
Program #3655
1. Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 13:243.
2. William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up,” English Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Russell
Noyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 309.
3. Channing Pollock, “The World’s Slow Stain,” Reader’s Digest (June 1960), 77.