I walk along forest trails, absorbed in a kind of dialogue with myself, thinking it through, pausing occasionally to reflect on what I’m doing. I am home again an hour later, and the almost-two-year-old daughter of my god-daughter comes in to talk to me:
‘Kookaburra, John.’
‘Did you see a kookaburra,
‘Feed kookaburra, John.’
‘Did you feed the kookaburra?’
‘Kookaburra food.’ She runs to the fridge.
‘Do you want to feed the kookaburra,
‘Feed kookaburra.’ She runs to the sliding doors leading on to the deck. We go out to feed the kookaburra. Afterwards,
These endless sequences of phrases, transforming through time like minimalist music, the processing of experience in language simultaneous with language development itself. ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ wrote the philosopher Wittgenstein, and at this stage of development, this seems irrefutable. Just a year ago,
Now she is articulating her immediate experience. This is the journey. In a year she will be thinking, as speech turns inward through the encounter with the world, to form images of its experience — thus becoming reflective, not just exclamatory. These essential developmental stages will be elaborated throughout childhood into her soul’s faculties of willing, feeling, and thinking, until one day
This journey, however, is not an easy stroll across a field. It is work. I remember watching my second daughter take her first fully independent steps, hesitantly balanced between poise and impetus, and how she suddenly became aware of a new possibility: her hands were free to carry things! Her delight in picking up a basket with her little dolls in it, and then learning to carry them along so freely, seemed to affirm this wonderful human capacity of walking upright. And perhaps this moment was the catalyst for the next stage, for it seemed that the action was immediately reflected inward, into her need to articulate the experience. It was as though, having found freedom of movement in physical space, the very ground she walked on then became the resistance that turned the impulse of movement inward, towards the inspiration of speech, that process of orientation in soul space.
And then there is that point in a child’s development at about the age of three, when they look out at the world, as though for the first time seeing it as something separate from them. It is a first epiphanic moment of realisation, of an awareness and celebration of self, and of the continuity of one’s own existence in space and time. From that moment on, children have life-long memories, and they can think.
It is my other children who demonstrated so clearly this revelation of self-consciousness in thinking. I can see my son — how he gathered together all the electrical extension cords in the house and used them to interconnect each room. Then he stood still and gazed at his handiwork, tracking the lines. That continuum of cables going from one room into the other, and then the way he surveyed the effect, gravely reflecting, was his moment of connecting thoughts together.
My oldest daughter’s moment, existentialist that she is, was enacted differently. I was in the garden, and she had been playing on the far side of the house. Suddenly she peered at me around one end of the house, calling, ‘Here I am!’ Then she disappeared, only to poke her head around the other end of the house to proclaim, ‘I still am!’
Moments of realisation of the continuity of existence… An orientation in spirit space.
