I would like to introduce you to a little girl. She is about 13 months old, and she is holding on to her parent for support while moving her heinie and her head to the music that is in her heart. This does not seem like anything special; after all, children dance, laugh with an open mouth, and speak in their own language.
However, I failed to mention that Emma has her first cochlear implant and it has not been turned on yet, and that the hearing aid for her other ear has been taken away for a couple of weeks. So, without hearing the rest of the world at all, she is so full of love, happiness, and the power to create that she does not have time to feel bad about her loss of hearing or anything else. She is free to be the very special Emma that God created her to be.
She feels the warmth and power of unconditional love. She can do anything. At 13 months old, she does not realize that she is lacking anything. She does not have to hear someone else say what she should be and do. She sees a world where people smile, make funny faces, and hug and kiss her all the time. Emma certainly lets people know her needs and wants and does it with the most beautiful smile and contagious laugh.
Right after Emma was born, someone told her grandmother, “I’m sorry your granddaughter was born disabled,” and her grandmother replied, “There’s nothing to be sorry for; my granddaughter was born exactly the way God wanted her to be – perfect.”
As we grow older, we tend to lose Emma’s freedom. Through the passing of time, many of us have experienced being laughed at, ridiculed, judged. I have heard people say that as a child they did not realize they were different, and different was not good once they went to school, or even worse, when they were pitied. Pity comes from a personal view of loss that we feel compelled to share with others, and so we feel sorry for them.
What would happen if we celebrated gratitude for what we have and built our lives on our strengths, joy and potential? Research shows that our thoughts have the power to shape our brain. The more conscious we are about perceiving the world around us and focus on our experiences as being positive, the more this positive perception spreads. Rick Hanson explains that negative experiences are like “Velcro” and tend to stick in our minds, whereas positive experiences are like “Teflon” and more readily slip away. We must take control to intentionally work to integrate positive experiences into our brain.
One study estimates that the average child hears the word no or don’t over 148,000 times while growing up, compared with just a few thousand yes messages. Negative words can push the spirit out of a child.
“We are all creative, but by the time we are three or four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.” - Maya Angelo
Emma is now over two years old and has had both cochlear implants put in. She takes a “Music and Me” class on Saturday morning with her grandmother, where she is allowed to dance in the middle of the circle with other children all around her while music is being played. Surrounded with rhythms and textures, she is still dancing and feeling love as part of her natural environment.
You get to choose to allow all children to be like Emma and dance when they cannot hear the music, smile with their whole being, and throw back their head and let the sun shine down on their face. So choose how you intentionally help the little ones in your life enjoy the freedom to be who they were created to be. They were not created to be anyone else’s version of who or what they should be. As you go throughout your day and life, ask yourself this very important question: Who have you help to dance today?
