5-year-old Philosophy

Jake and I were having dinner together, just the two of us, and while we were waiting for our food to arrive we had a very interesting conversation.

It started out very silly. I was eating lots of bread and he was playing ghost chair with his feet and he asked me, almost as an extension of all of the other gibberish he entertains himself with, why I was always eating bread. I told him, "I'm not." Maybe he thought I meant that I wasn't eating bread at that moment, when I clearly was.

Jake: How come when you're eating bread you're really not eating bread?

Me: And when you're not eating bread?

Jake: You are eating bread... and when you're up, you're down!

Me: And when you're in?

Jake: You're out!

Me: And when it's night?

Jake: It's day! ... And when you're nothing, you're everything. And when there's a ladder, there's not a ladder!

This made me laugh a lot, and I can't exactly say why. It was just the genius I perceived in it, and the apparent randomness. But it didn't matter what we said. This theme afforded us almost an entire dinner of enjoyment. There was, in fact, a ladder behind me which was leaning up against the building, and he made sure to point that out to me.

The thing that really caught me off guard, was this: When my Dad walked up after we had finished eating, Jake ran to him and said, "Daddy, Jason and I were saying that when you're God, you're not God." Maybe I misheard him, because I know that we never said those words to each other, but he did seem to summarize it well. I had already been trying to remember what we had been saying so that I could write it later. Sometimes the things that children say are meaningless, and sometimes they are just beyond understanding. He can't put his own "sun scream" on, but he sure has some deep teachings to share if we listen.