Looking Through My Daughter’s Eyes

     If you’re like me, you became a father a year ago. Literally. Today, as these words land on your doorstep, (or are made ready for you to access via the internet,) it is the morning of my daughter’s 1st birthday. She is expecting gifts and praise from all of you, though to be fair, that has very little to do with the happenstance of what day it is.

     Over the past year, I have made mention of my daughter, but I have tried to keep her as the context or impetus for a topic rather than the topic itself. First, I think it’s a bit unfair to use a specific someone without their consent. (Even if that someone is entirely dependent on my wife and me.) Second, parents that go on and on about their children to the annoyance of everyone around them is the easy cliché fodder of every sitcom on television and I’d like to not fall into that trap.

     At the risk of toeing that line though, I’d like to outline what I find to be the most fascinating thing about my daughter. It’s probably true of all children her age but I only have a sample size of one. To my daughter, everything is new.

     That looks simple when you just read it in a few words, but its’ been a year and I still can’t get over that concept. Everything is new for her. Every sight, every sound, every idea represents the first time she has encountered it. That blows my mind and I’m profoundly jealous.

     Take a moment and try to think of the last time you had a genuinely, purely new moment. When’s the last time your senses, your way of conceiving the world, had new input? For my daughter, it was about 5 seconds ago. I can’t remember when it was for me.

Now, we could get abstract and spiritual and talk about the “live for the day” approach. Every moment is new because it hasn’t happened before so make the most of it. The kinds of philosophy that motivational speakers and sky-dive instructor’s pay their bills with. That’s not really what were talking about. We’re not talking about making every day unique and new. We’re talking about appreciating the unique newness that already exists there.

When my daughter gets up in the morning, she divides her time between flipping through one of the tomes in her library and staring out the front window. The same books, same window, and the same sights from both. She sits there, studies it like she did the first time she encountered it, and once she has made sense of whatever she’s studying, she will turn and laugh like she just made a breakthrough, the same breakthrough she makes every morning.

We all travel through life with so many preconceived notions based on our own experiences, preferences, education, and a plethora of other sources. We don’t see anything for the first time because we relate new experience to something we’ve already been through, for context. That’s how the brain works. My daughter doesn’t have those experiences, so she doesn’t have those preconceived notions. Every new idea she encounters is allowed to stand on its own. Imagine what that would be like, to have an uncluttered conception of the world. 

So, Happy birthday, Willow. I’m going to try to teach you everything I know from Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to how to find North without a compass. It will all pale in comparison to what you have taught me. How to see things for the first time.