Notes to Self -- 2025

March 1, 2023  When you spend time with (brilliant) young children, it feels like an alternative world. It's easy to get used to how different they are than adults after spending day after day with them. Their concerns and complexities and ideas and creative expression can make it seem like they are more than children, but other times they are exactly as childish as you'd expect children to be, willfully self-centered, emotionally overwhelmed by small frustrations and often wearing their hearts on their sleeves, spontaneous elated, affectionate, moody, rebellious, and enthusiastic. But they often have ideas as good or better than those of adults, and are often as wise or wiser, and their memories are sharper, and they are often right about things or able to remind you of what you overlooked or forgot. Plus they can do things like learn new languages, do gymnastics, play classical music, remember and recite pages of dialogue or forgive people without holding grudges in ways that...