I’m sitting in the park and just overheard a conversation between some parents and their kids.

Out of the blue, the little girl says Let me tell you my favorite colors.

The dad doesn’t hesitate; he just starts guessing.

The kids—a boy and a girl—are on scooters.

The dad is trying to get them to ride in the direction that they’re walking.

He says, Look, it’s like a racetrack.

Maybe the little boy registers it; maybe he doesn’t.

But the dad is using his imagination. That goes into the subconscious of both the dad and the boy.

In the background, the little girl says to the mom, White.

Oh, white, she replies. That’s a nice color.

Yeah, glittery, sparkly, white.

And I just sat there, smiling.

It must simplify things, seeing life through your children’s eyes. How do we lose that? Why don’t we just out of the blue say Do you want to know my favorite color?

Is it fear? We think life must be more serious than that? Or maybe that it has to be?

Our imagination is everything. Our imagination turns reality into art. If we lose our imagination, we lose the point.

We’re on this Earth for a reason. Maybe it’s just to evolve as souls. Maybe it’s just to have some fun. Not in a purely hedonistic sense, but rather to do our best in life and to have fun with it no matter where our path leads. To feel failure and heartbreak, victory and success, friendship and loss, sickness and health.

To feel love.

The human experience is a means for our soul to evolve.

What a ride.

As adults, we act as if it’s a given that we’re here, on this rock, spinning in complete and utter darkness. Of course that’s the case. We’re so caught up in the game we think the point is winning, when the point is to have the chance to play at all.

Kids aren’t thinking; they’re just playing the game of life. Shouldn’t that tell us something? That when a human being comes into the world, all they want to do is play? Heed their curiosity? Create?

We grow out of this, subsumed by culture, standards, expectations, beliefs. And then we think we’re too smart, too mature, too important to act like a kid again, when that’s all we’re really here to do.

We grow, we die, we come full circle.

Some people say it’s selfish to bring a child into this world. So what if it is. Maybe kids are supposed to teach us what it’s all about. We need them more than they need us, if only we would let them be.