I want to share a tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I feel portrays very nicely the innocence and wisdom that children can teach us ...It was originally in Spanish and translated to English:
Once there was a scientist who lived worried about the problems in the world, and was decided to find the ways in which these could be less. He would spend days and days in his lab searching for answers with no results.
Then one day, his seven year old son invaded his sanctuary, set upon helping him
in his task. The scientist, nervous about his son's interruption, asked him to go play outside. Seeing that it was impossible to get him out, the father thought of something to give his child to distract his attention. Suddenly he found a magazine in which there was a map of the world! With scissors, he cut in several pieces the map, grabbed some duct tape and gave all that to his son and said: "Since I know how much you like jigsaw puzzles, I am going to give you the world all cut into pieces so that you repair it all by yourself".
The scientist thought that it would take the child at least 10 days to repair the map, but it didn't happen that way.
Just after a few hours, he heard his child's voice calling him in a serene way. "Dad, I finished repairing the whole map." At first the father didn't believe his son. He thought that it was impossible that at his young age, he could repair it without ever seeing it before. Skeptical, looking away from his scientific writings, he directed his sight towards the map that his son had repaired. He was certain to find a job made by just a kid.
Surprisingly, he noticed that the map was very well put ogether, with all the pieces placed in the correct place. How was that possible? How was the child capable of doing such a good work?
The father with much amazement asked his son: "My child, you didn't know how the world was, how did you do it?
And the child answered: "Dad, I didn't know how the world was...but when you took out the map from the magazine to cut it into pieces, I noticed that in the other side, there was the shape of a man." So I turned each little piece and started to repair the man. When I was able to repair the man, I turned it to the other side and saw that I had repaired the world."
Courtesy of Ming Hui Wong
