What Small Children Have That Adults Lose

Watching a two-year-old for an afternoon produces a reaction that is hard to name and does not reduce to envy of their circumstances. Nobody wants to be two. The thing being noticed is not the absence of responsibility.

Chapter 55 puts a small child at the centre of a chapter about te — the quality a person carries, spelled teh in Dwight Goddard's 1919 rendering — and the detail it selects is precise enough to show what is meant.

The Chapter Does Not Say Innocence

"The essence of teh is comparable to the state of a young boy. Poisonous insects will not sting him, wild beasts will not seize him, birds of prey will not attack him. The bones are weak, the muscles are tender, it is true, but his grasp is firm" (chapter 55, Dwight Goddard, 1919).

The list of creatures is an image and not a claim about the world; small children are conspicuously not immune to anything, and reading the lines as a safety guarantee makes the chapter say something silly. What the image conveys is a kind of unavailability — nothing has purchase, there is no handle by which to be caught.

What the chapter does not say anywhere is innocence, purity, or not yet knowing about evil. That is the reading most often supplied, and it is imported. The word the chapter uses for what the child has is harmony, and the difference matters: innocence is something a person can only lose, while harmony describes a way of being organised, which is at least in principle recoverable.

The Child Who Does Not Go Hoarse

Then comes the detail that gives the argument away, and it is an oddly specific one to include: "He can sob and cry all day without becoming hoarse; his harmony as a child is perfect indeed!"

Anyone who has been near a small child knows this is observably true, and it is genuinely strange. An adult shouting for twenty minutes has no voice left. A toddler can cry for hours and start again after lunch at full strength.

The reason is not lung capacity. It is that the child is not doing two things at once. There is no part of them holding the sound back while another part pushes it out — no monitoring of how the crying sounds, no consideration of who can hear, no effort to stop and simultaneous failure to stop. Hoarseness comes from strain, and strain comes from division. The child is not divided, so the volume costs them nothing.

That is what the chapter means by harmony, and it is a mechanical description rather than a sentimental one. Not gentleness, not sweetness. The absence of internal opposition — one thing happening at a time, without a second process running against it.

From the Tao

He can sob and cry all day without becoming hoarse. — Tao Te Ching, chapter 55 (Dwight Goddard, 1919)

What Took Its Place

The second process is not a defect and it is worth being fair to it, because the chapter is sometimes used to run down ordinary adult competence.

What develops in place of the child's undivided state is the ability to hold a reaction while assessing it: to be angry and not say the thing, to be frightened and keep working, to notice a response and decide whether to act on it. That capacity is most of what makes an adult useful. It permits negotiation, care of other people, and every job that involves being told something one does not want to hear.

The cost is that it runs continuously once installed, including where it is doing nothing. It runs during a conversation with an old friend. It runs while playing with one's own children — the part that is checking how this looks, whether enough is being done, what is next. Tiredness of the kind an afternoon with a two-year-old exposes is not usually about activity. It is the second process, still going, with nothing to do.

Not a Recommendation to Be Childish

The chapter is not asking anyone to go back, and it says so in its own terms a few lines later: "Things fully grown are about to decay; they are the opposite of Tao."

That line is about completion rather than age. What has been fully formed has stopped being able to move; it is finished, and finished things have only one direction left. The child is held up not because childhood is preferable but because a child is still in the condition of not being finished — supple, unset, with the shape not yet decided.

So the question the chapter leaves is not how to become innocent again, which is not on offer, but how much of the second process is actually load-bearing. Some of it is doing necessary work. A good deal of it is running from habit in rooms where nothing is at stake, and that portion is not competence. It is just noise with the lights on.

A Smaller Thing to Try

Once this week, in a setting with genuinely nothing at stake — a walk, a small child, an old friend, music in the house alone — notice whether the monitor is running. Do not switch it off; it does not take instructions.

Just note what it is checking. Usually it turns out to be inspecting something with no audience: how the walk is going, whether this is being enjoyed correctly, what should happen next. Seeing it idle is most of the work, because the process is largely sustained by not being noticed.

Chapter 55 makes no promise that it stops. It observes that the undivided state is what a person has before the machinery arrives, that the machinery is genuinely useful, and that a great deal of adult tiredness is the machinery running in rooms where nothing needed managing.