Today is my daughters  birthday. She’s one year old. Been around a year – her entirety encompassed in 12 months. How much has changed. How relative everything is. But to see her awake and alive to the world you realise how much one can learn in a year. It’s astonishing the amount an infant learns in a matter of days, weeks and months. From a human being with no sense of the world at all to a cute little thing who eats dirt, licks the floor, pulls everything out of anything she can get her hands on, in, under, drinks out of cups, eats raisins, farts, splashes with her duck in the bath, sits on your head in the bed, stands, points, laughs, cries, plays peek a – boo and waves good bye every time you head out the door. All in all a new personality unleashed on an unsuspecting world.  And I’ve been told this rate of learning continues unabated for years.  How incredible.

Pity we seem to slow down as we get older. Pity we seem to disregard play as a positive course of action. A necessary means to learn more about ourselves and our relationship with the world around us. Why do we stop? Why is it so difficult to keep playing, keep trying, keep willing ourselves to stand up and try to walk? Are we too afraid to fail, to fall, to hurt ourselves? Is our pride and vanity an obstacle to our development as human beings. Articulate creative beings. What a shame I say. What a pity. What a lost opportunity. So today is a reminder to myself that not all is about holding on to what I know but more about reaching out to what I don’t.