One way to discover who you are in your essence is to revisit who you were as a child. What puzzled or intrigued you? What made you curious? What made perfect sense and what made no sense at all? When were you stirred by righteous indignation and when were you jubilant?
The human spirit as it manifests itself in adult life can always be traced back to a time of innocent childhood inquiry.
Take Carl Rogers, father of person-centered therapy. As a child he would hear a student ask a question and the teacher would give a perfectly good answer to a completely different question. He writes about this: “A feeling of pain and distress would always strike me. My reaction was, “But you didn’t hear him!” (Freedom to Learn, p. 222) As an adult his focus was on listening.
Viktor Frankl, whose therapeutic approach was based on meaning in life similarly had a childhood experience that made him jump. The teacher spoke about human beings in mechanical terms, and Frankl felt this was untenable. If this were true, what meaning is there to life?
We can pay attention to children’s questions and cultivate their uniqueness. We can take adults back to the questions they asked as children and reignite their quest for meaning. For a quest that relates to one’s life mission remains a quest for a lifetime.