Yesterday I was quietly enjoying an Indian lunch at my favorite deli when a two-year-old boy caught my attention. Not because he was exceptional, but because he wasn’t. He was a normal little boy having lunch with his mother. He’d sit on a picnic-style bench next to her for a while, munching on finger food from his bowl, then squirm around a bit and look at everyone (unless of course someone met his eyes, when he would turn away quickly), then he’d toddle off–but not too far away–toddle back to safety next to Mom and then go back to looking around. Everything he saw he was absorbing, absorbing, absorbing. I suspect it was from observations like this that Maria Montessori coined the term “the absorbent mind.”
And so I began to think: Who is this child? Where did he come from, and where is he going? It’s the same question any person could ask of any child, even her own. A long-ago friend said once, “When my daughter was born and I was nursing her, I saw her little eye looking up at me and I looked down at her and I knew that there was something about her that had nothing to do with me.”
She didn’t believe in reincarnation, so far as I know, but I did. So I thought, “Of course.” But yesterday my musings on the soul coming into a new body rose to a different level. Just think–perhaps this little boy had been most recently embodied as a Tibetan monk, or as an opera diva in Italy, or as a car salesman in China. Perhaps this soul’s mission, as it was told to him before he came into this embodiment, is to be the president of the United States, or the leader of a spiritual renaissance in this country, or the inventor of a new technology that will take all civilization to a new level. Or even a car salesman in Poughkeepsie.
Obviously this child’s knowledge of Tibetan scriptures or of opera librettos or of now-defunct Chinese auto manufacturers would not help directly in fulfilling his mission in this life. He has to hit the ground running and get up to speed in all aspects of his new life–quickly! In just the first six years, he has a laundry list of skills to master and information to internalize–his new native language, for instance. Hence the absolute necessity for his mind to absorb everything around him, to prepare him to fulfill his new role in a new place and a new culture.
And thus the miracle of the absorbent mind. To paraphrase an old saying, “If the absorbent mind did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.” Whoever could have thought up something so absolutely necessary and so perfectly efficient? Who, indeed?