No one is born a poet. No one is born an artist. Sure, some kids might be more creative or analytical than others, but the artist’s perspective is cultivated. It is not a gift, it is a skill.
In the 1940s, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with Beauford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Delaney stopped the young Baldwin. “Look,” he said, as he pointed down into the gutter. “What do you see?” All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney, an American modernist painter known for his expressive, light-filled work, told him to look again. Baldwin did so and saw (and later recalled in his reflections on their friendship), “the oily slick on the water’s surface and the way it reflected the buildings above in a strange, unexpected beauty.”
Baldwin was forever changed by this experience—this chance to see beauty in something ordinary and ugly. “The reality of his seeing,” Baldwin later said of what Delaney had pointed out, “caused me to begin to see.”
It is also clear in Meditations (this month, when you buy the leatherbound edition, you’ll get our How to Read Meditations Digital Guide—including an invite to our live Q&A call—free) that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. As we’ve mentioned, how else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things—the way an olive rots on the ground or the way foam flecked a boar’s mouth?
Whether our kids turn out to be painters or writers or stockpickers or plumbers or chefs, this ability to see is important. It’s a gift we can help them develop. It’s a sight more important than 20/20 vision.
We have to point stuff out. We have to show them beauty and inspiration in all its forms. We have to expose them to the great works of art and the little things in life. Because if we don’t teach them how to see, the world will teach them not to. It will rush them past the small things. It will train their eyes on screens instead of skies.
So slow down. Stop at the puddle. Ask them what they notice. Then show them what you see. Teach them to look—and then teach them to look again.
