A glimpse into Gabriel's world, which is different from our world
On our return trip to France, at Dulles airport in DC, Gabriel plays with his favorite cars, and his new Batman, on top of a very temporary stack of suitcases on the luggage cart.
The Batman appears to serve as little more than a witness, as he is invariably lying on the sidelines, and does not appear to be too motivated to participate. Nonetheless, Gabriel likes to have him around.
But it is the cars Gabriel loves. The intriguiging thing, though, is not the cars, but how he plays with them.
I don't mean how he moves the cars this way or that. I mean how the world in which he moves those cars is completely apart from our world, yours and mine.
Could you be in the most public of places and be able to create on a whim, in an instant, a mirco world, where everything around you becomes wholly immaterial, and the world before you is real life? Where the imaginary becomes the real, and the real becomes the unimportant and incidental? How long could you maintain this? One second? Two?
Children have this sublime capacity, and it has little practical time limit, that I have seen.
They have another capacity, too, one that accompanies it. To be themselves, without a thought in the world what others may think about it. This is an even more extraordinary aptitude than the first.
Imagine it. Where you are utterly free to revel in beauty, or fun, or speed, or color ― whatever quickens your heart ― without any consequences. No judgments. It is just there ― pristine, benevolent ― untainted by even the possiblity of it being appraised or adjudicated in the first place. No magisterial, ermine-entwined authorities at all! They don't exist! Can you imagine? Or would you always give in ― and quickly at that ― to the dull pressure of an impinging referee, forever looming in the background?
The stack of suitcases in front of Gabriel was more than it seemed. To me, and I would guess every other person in that teeming hall. But what if I, or they, could re-learn, or better yet, tumble back into, that capacity we had once, to not care what anybody else does or says, where we would just see our own personal worlds as the only real one?
