I’m convinced that monster.com must have one of the best advertising companies around.  The reason I think this is because they tend to do really funny, thought-provoking TV commercials.  I was just searching for a particular commercial I remembered from years ago when I realized that it, too, was also an Monster.com advertisement.  You remember the “When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be…” commerical?  If not, you can watch it here…

This ad resurfaced for me when I was reading this section of Kathleen Norris’ book The Cloister Walk.  She has some insightful things to say about embracing our epiphanies and re-discovering the treasure of delights enjoyed in childhood:

Working with children on the writing of poetry has led me to ponder the ways that most of us become exiled from the certainties of childhood; how it is that the things we most treasure when we’re young are exactly those things we come to spurn as teenagers and young adults.  Very small children are often conscious of God, for example in ways that adults seldom are.  They sing to God, they talk to God, they recognize divine presence in the world around them…Yet the budding theologians often despise church by the time they’re in the eighth grade.

In a similar way, the children who unselfconsciously make up songs and poems when they’re young–I once observed a three-year-old singing a passionate ode to the colorful vegetables in a supermarket–quickly come to regard poetry as meaningless and irrelevant.  I began to despise mathematics when I sensed that I was getting only part of the story, a dull, literal-minded version of what in fact was a great mystery, and I wonder if children don’t begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.  If we teach children when they’re young to reject their epiphanies, then it’s no wonder that we end up with so many adults who are mathematically, poetically, and theologically illiterate.

In the adult pursuit of security, practicality, and responsibility–maintaining a certain “life-style”–I wonder what kind of minor and major compromises we end up making with our dreams.  Why do we pass these lesser values on as somehow superior traits instead of embracing epiphany and wonder.  Is it surprising that life becomes such a grind?  My final answer, once again, we just don’t “get” poetry anymore–and not getting it is causing us to lose a very important chunk of our soul (small ‘s’, not capital ‘S’).  Or maybe poetry’s not your thing.  Maybe you have lost the sense of awe in contemplating the God-breathed enigma of complex trigonometry.  We do so to our detriment.  (I suddenly sound like a politician.)