Sand Castles and Sharks’ Teeth

Keeping alive these three flowers of childhood can lead to a fuller life

In moments of stress, slow down and view the world through the eyes of a child to rediscover a sense of joy and wonder. (Fei Meng)

Published in 1986, and still popular today, Robert Fulghum’s bestseller “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” highlights the life lessons learned in early childhood. Play fair, don’t hit people, and hold hands and stick together were just a few of the axioms making Fulghum’s list.

“Take any one of these items,” he wrote, “and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life, or your work, or your government, or your world, and it holds true and clear and firm.”

A mid-June week at the beach with some of my children and grandchildren brought Fulghum’s book to mind. Parents and teenage siblings were passing on similar lessons to the little ones. Be nice to your cousins, don’t take a second bowl of ice cream until everyone has been served, and wash the sand off your feet before coming into the house were all mini-lessons for growth and maturity.

As that younger tribe of kids aged 3 to 8 bounced around the beach and the house, they were students, yes, daily taught proper etiquette and behavior, but they themselves offered unintended lessons to anyone paying attention. Here are three of those tutorials that might benefit all of us in our relationships and the workplace.

Curiosity and Wonder

This stretch of the Carolina coast is a treasure trove of sharks’ teeth, and the children found dozens of them in the sand and broken shells of the tideline. The delight of the younger ones with each discovery—they’d run to the adults with these T-shaped black teeth clutched in their hands—led a few of us to investigate online, where we learned that these fossils were at least 10,000 years old and that sharks grow and lose thousands of teeth over a lifetime.

The pre-teen set taught the adults to look a bit closer at our immediate world and marvel at the riches to be found there.

Playfulness and Imagination

The rough surf of this beach yielded few whole seashells, but the younger girls found several with holes near the top. They ran a colored string through these otherwise common shells and made necklaces. Meanwhile, the boys took shovels and buckets and twice dug enormous holes in the sand, imagining themselves as pirates burying a chest of gems or as embattled soldiers in a trench.

From ordinary shells and sand, they created beauty and adventure. From marriages, friendships, and work we can do the same.

Living in the Moment

In the midst of the daily hubbub, a 6-year-old became utterly absorbed in an oversized Babar book, oblivious to the chaos surrounding him. On another day, three of his cousins, along with an adult, spent two hours bent over a jigsaw puzzle, slowly constructing a picture of three dogs. This thousand-piece puzzle held their concentration sweetly captive through a windy afternoon.

Counselors, life coaches, and certain books, websites, and articles all stress being fully present in certain moments, focusing on tasks at hand rather than brooding over the past or fretting about the future. Our adult obligations and distractions may keep us from the white-heat focus of a child, but the joy derived from relishing the present as much as possible can still be ours.

By the time that we become adults, we have pulled up many of the weeds of childhood and adolescence: self-absorption, tantrums, bad manners, and all the other nettles and crabgrass of youth. But the blossoms in that garden—the curiosity, the passion for investigation and creativity, taking pleasure in the day—deserve a lifetime of water, sunshine, and tender care.