“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” – Edward de Bono Children have a unique way of seeing the world.  It is a wide open place, a canvas for creativity, a land where anything is possible if only we wish it to be.  It is a world where limitations do not exist, the heart and mind are open and people are not distinguished by how they are different, but by how they are the same.

A handful of years ago my youngest came home from baseball practice.  He was about 7 at the time and was just entering the Little League system.  “Mom, my coach has brown skin,” he confided in me when he walked in the door.  “And he’s really funny.”

That was all there was to it.  I remember at the time thinking that it was a curious remark.  He had been in school for several years and his school was certainly a diverse one.  It wasn’t the first time he had come across someone who was of a different race than he.  And yet, the simplicity and innocence with which he shared that information stayed with me.

I bring this up because I took a call the other day from a group trying to get a proposition on the November ballot that “protects marriage”.  It was an automated call, the message delivered in a matter of fact, emotionless manner.  But it made me angry.

My first reaction was to hang up.  It took seconds.  Just long enough for my tired and somewhat distracted brain to register the message that was being conveyed.  I hung up, but the slime was already on me.

And four days later I’m still trying to wash it off.  With all the things there are to pay attention to in the world, why are we spending precious time trying to keep people who love each other from making a life long commitment?  With our soldiers dying in Iraq, our schools losing funding and services to the poor and disenfranchised being cut, why are we pushing a platform of hate and exclusion?  As if we have a monopoly on what is right?  Who are we kidding?  The divorce rate for that most hallowed of institutions is at 50%.

My niece loves cats.  She has a collection of cats that rivals any collection of stuffed felines I have ever seen.  Big cats, small cats, live cats and pretend cats… they all find their way into her wonderful, creative, wide open world.  It is a world she readily shares, welcoming you in with a big, toothy smile as if to say, “Come join me and be a kitty too.”  Hers is not a world that is limited by “what is acceptable”.

She’s about the same age as my son was when he came home that day from baseball practice and proclaimed in that fascinated sort of way that he had seen something new.  It was a moment of triumph for him, a discovery of an and in the world.  There was something else that he hadn’t quite noticed before and it was great.

When do we lose that acceptance?  When does it start?  The breakdown of that wide-open creative way of being in the world to the small thinking, four sided, box-like cookie cutter way?  The “everything has to look the same, way?  The “this is how we’ve always done it” way?  The dangerous “this is the right way” way?

If only we could maintain the creative innocence of a six year old.  A world where snow cats grace the landscape and  there are no limitations to what we can create.