Everyday ethics: Childlike vs. childish

There’s a difference between being childlike and childish. Childlike means being able to wonder about life. Childish is what adults can be when they try to act serious and end up looking foolish.

Commentator Tucker Carlson offered an example of childishness when he pretended to be a journalist interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin with questions even Putin said were softball ones. If Carlson thinks Russia is so great, maybe he should move there and see how he feels.

Some years ago I wrote a book for children using an ancient storytelling method — fables — to share wisdom.  As was the case centuries ago, I often used animal characters to tell the stories. My hope was that adults would share the stories with children and ask them what life lessons they learned from the tale.

Recently I reread the book for the first time in a long time and thought one in particular had advice for me about how to deal with silly pundits or politicians in our time.

Pink Elephants

The cats went for  walk in the neighborhood.

“Have you ever seen a pink elephant?” one of them asked.

“No, said the other, “because there are no pink elephants.”

“Of course there are,” said the other.

“Ain’t so,” taunted the second cat.

The first cat stopped for a moment before speaking. “Tell you what — I want you to stop thinking about pink elephants, since according to you they aren’t real.  Whatever you do, don’t think about pink elephants/”

“That should be easy,” said the other cat.

All day long he tried to stop thinking about pink elephants, but all day long that’s all he could think about. He thought about them so much that he began to believe they were real, and when at night he fell into an exhausted sleep, he dreamt about — you guessed it, pink elephants.

Moral: Just let go. The harder you try to get rid of some ideas or people, the more they hang around.

John C. Morgan is an author and teacher. The fable above is one of many in his book “A Little Wisdom for Growing up,” Second Edition, available on Amazon.