In this new year, I find myself developing what I can only describe as baby consciousness. A desire to reboot the world, to restart and refresh, so that we might begin again on a truly new note. Beyond the romantic notions of fresh starts, I want to arrive here with a renewed faith in humanity—a new way of believing.
After all, a baby is more than the caterwauling mess that emerges into bright, shadowless hospital lights. Those lights are meant to reveal everything, to hide nothing, offering an unflinching first look at what will belong to us for the duration of our lives. As we grapple with the truth of this existence, sometimes we—the parents, the elders, the witnesses—become magi figures of sorts. We commune with generations yet unborn, sensing their struggles, intuiting their vulnerabilities. And so, as the year arrives new and shiny, my thoughts travel to babies—not out of sentimentality, but out of longing for simplicity. For a life more meaning-filled, for everyone who inhabits this fragile world.
“…as the year arrives new and shiny, my thoughts travel to babies—not out of sentimentality, but out of longing for simplicity.”
The world itself has forced me into this baby consciousness. The last few years have been cruel, teetering on chaos, and the only rudder that keeps my ship straight has been my dreams. I dream of innocence and freedom and togetherness. I dream of family, of traditions, of time well spent. Yet what I see around me is a world edging toward senselessness for vast majorities of people. And if I cannot help the protesters in Iran or Caracas, in the West Bank or Minneapolis, then perhaps the only thing I can do is help from my own stoop. I can begin with myself, relearning that survival in these times depends on kindness and compassion—practiced first within my own being, then extended outward.
(Image credit: Enea Lebrun / Reuters)
I’ve read that babies dream even before they enter this world—that they channel their environments, feel the emotional weather around them. As philosopher and psychologist Claudio Passos Ferreira suggests, they are capable of conscious perception and conscious expectation. They arrive not empty, but receptive.
“I’ve read that babies dream even before they enter this world.”
If we want a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, perhaps the only way is to place ourselves in situations we’ve never known before—falling in love with someone or something new, or standing alone in a city we’ve never walked. In those moments, consciousness doesn’t contract; it expands. Everything feels sharper, brighter, more urgent. That sensation, they say, mimics the same neurotransmitters babies swim in naturally.
“So what is it like to be a baby?”
So what is it like to be a baby? Maybe it’s like being in love in Paris for the first time. And if what we truly want—for ourselves, for the world—is open-mindedness, imagination, creativity, innovation, then perhaps the quiet work of this year is this: allowing ourselves, at least some of the time, to think less like guarded adults and more like children. To meet the world not armored, but awake.
