Wisdom Begins in Wonder

I’ve been thinking a lot about it myself but Findlay is at the stage just now where they are talking about careers at school an awful lot. They are setting up a bank for his class to run and the way they are talking about it all it would seem as though they are expecting it to be real work experience rather than an introduction to earning and saving money. On the plus side it has actually got them talking a bit more about ‘what they want to be when they grow up’. It’s the next step from wanting to be an astronaut or a fireman I suppose.

In Findlay’s case he’s went straight to the ‘I want the job with the most money’ and then very quickly realised that he might not get that straight away. I’ve been listening to a lot of Scroobius Pip recently and I don’t think he has a track that hasn’t managed to get me thinking. The most recent one on repeat has been The Struggle which contain the following lyrics.

People underestimate the value of dreaming,
That which you aspire to provides a roof, a ceiling;
In particular the dreams there’s no way of achieving,
Like, “I wanna be Brad Pitt,” or something equally fleeting.

When we got talking about what he’d like to be I found it really hard not to shoot down his ideas as either unobtainable or very hard to do. The thing is though without that ability to dream and maybe take a leap for something way out there you never look up. You never aspire to anything other than what is right in front of you. As Mr Pip says those thoughts and dreams give you structure and something to look forward to.

We swiftly moved on to other jobs that he might like and he settled on being a professional gamer as his friend says you can earn anything up to £200 per week and as many free games and consoles as you could fit in your house or sell!

I did burst his bubble on that one a little. I explained that when you add it up it isn’t that much money but I did explain earning cash by winning competitions and the idea behind sponsorship for free stuff. He hasn’t gave up on the idea yet but he thinks he’ll either need to move to the US or to Asia if he wants to make any money. I did offer up games journalist as a possible different side of things as he was more interested in the free games than the money if truth be told.

With all this in mind Nairn really surprised me this evening. He wandered into the kitchen and declared that the ‘best and most important toy he’s going to have when he grows up is his imagination’. I think we made a good one there.