There are small moments that arrive quietly, almost shyly, and yet they stay with you far longer than the larger, louder ones. I’m recollecting a similar moment with my son Ehan to share.. The bed sheets were slightly crumpled, a toy robot with springy arms rested there, and beside it was a pencil sketch my son had made with all the seriousness a child can hold.
The most beautiful thing I felt is that I had not asked him to draw. He did not announce it to me after drawing. He simply sat down, picked up a pencil, and translated the world inside his mind onto paper.
A robot.
Sturdy, tall, oddly proportioned, cheerful in its own way.
A version entirely his.
Children are like that. They do not only see what is right in front of them. They see what might be, what could exist if the world allowed a little more imagination to spill over. And they draw from that place. Bill Moyers once said,
“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”
Although not in its enirety, I think I’m getting a sense of it when I saw this sketch.
Nothing about that afternoon was special. There were errands waiting, emails stacked up, adult worries humming in the background. And yet, right in the center of that ordinary day, my son quietly found the marvelous on a simple sheet of paper.
He studied the toy robot next to him, tracing its shapes with his eyes, not copying but interpreting. Children do not imitate. They reinvent. The circle on the head became a dot. The springs became long lines. The boots became tiny rounded feet. Every choice was an echo of how he sees, how he thinks, how he dreams.
Watching him, I felt something soften.
A reminder perhaps that imagination is not a luxury. It is a way of seeing the world brighter than it is. It is a way of staying open to possibility. Butwe are in a rush.
As we all might have read, Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist.”
And standing over that piece of paper, I realized the truth of it. Not because of skill or perfection, but because a child draws with a kind of unapologetic honesty. There is no fear of getting it wrong. No hesitation. No self edit. Only creation, as natural as breath.
We lose that somewhere along the way.
But our children thankfully keep showing us the path back.
Today, the sketch still lies on my desk. I have not moved it. I do not want to. It reminds me that there is something sacred in the small and unplanned acts of creativity. The marvelous does not always announce its arrival. Sometimes it walks into the room holding a pencil, humming softly, and draws a robot.
And sometimes, that is enough to light up an entire day.