Where is Stephen Hawking when you need him?
Last week Sophia asked me how the Earth started. I took a few deep breaths and before you knew it, I was dipping my toes into that soul-cleansing pool of unanswerable questions that turns even the most intelligent and well-read adults into stammering idiots.
How old is the Earth? How old is the universe? How are we here? Why are we here? How can people get to Mars? Why don't we fall off into space?
Our one-hour tête-a-tête over dinner turned out to be one of the most illuminating conversations I've ever had. I loved that my curious 9-year-old was questioning the complex machinations of our universe. Even more importantly, I was elated that Sophia, whose brain is like that of most kids— trafficking primarily in concrete facts—was entering the wondrous and shapeless territory of abstraction.
The question that took me forever to reconcile with my decidedly non-astrophysical mind was this: "How is Earth up there (pointing to the ceiling) and we're down here?" It took me a while to figure out that her image of Earth—our iconic blue spheroid, complete with continents and swirling clouds, a living ball of mass surrounded by the infinite blackness of the solar system—had been carved from what she'd seen in books and the internet, and that she couldn't figure out why we didn't see that same image from our street. How, she thought, could we possibly be on the planet yet not see it?
We spent a good hour trying to quell our twin frustrations; hers in comprehension and mine in explanation. I employed every prop I could think of, including ourselves ("You're the sun and I'm the Earth," I said as I spun around in place while also circling dizzily around Sophia and calling out "It's day, now night, now day...winter, now it's spring, summer, fall, winter, spring...") and some random objects around the house. We talked gravity and the elements and Big Bangs and God and orbits and space-time until I realized how much I simultaneously know and don't know.
So, so cool.
It was also strangely empowering to try to explain things that are not easy to explain, and to know that my kid expects me to know all this stuff. And it didn't matter what I knew or didn't. I came away feeling refreshed and exhilarated by Sophia's instinct to ask hard questions and her willingness to stretch to understand the complicated answers.
And at this time in our history, where technological advances, destruction of resources and the constant threat of terror conspire to drag us down, I would argue that self-awareness, compassion and tolerance—what truly makes us so freaking awesome as a species—are likely to remain our most potent antidotes against self-extinction. By questioning and wondering and listening and processing, Sophia has taken the first step on that incredible journey toward understanding what it truly means to be human. The possibilities of such growth are as endless and exciting as the universe itself.
And you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to appreciate how cool that really is.
