Today I want to invite you on a journey toward a child who certainly awaits this meeting. Inside us, sometimes patient and sometimes restless, our inner child waits.

The child we once were, with their experiences, relationships, emotions and thoughts, continues to live inside the condominium of our mind. Each of these dimensions, important on its own and fundamental together, is so essential to survival that memory records them with care.

There is a child sharing life with every adult. Often, she watches desperate adults trying to organize their own lives. I can even imagine the wide little eyes of each one’s inner child.

From another perspective, the child’s wonder, their delight in life, their dazzled gaze at colors, flavors, sounds and sensations, their sensitivity to the people around them also persist in memory, ready to light up the adult’s life.

At some point, for many and varied reasons, that child is imprisoned, forgotten, and the adult goes on with life on autopilot. Even if not consciously perceived, that child keeps interfering in the life of her adult jailer.

The unmet needs, the unwelcomed pains, the fear, the anger and the despair of that silenced child, when ignored, surface in behaviors, erupt like emotional geysers at the most varied moments of the adult’s life.

Repressed desires and unexperienced wonder also drive adults’ untimely, hasty or impulsive behaviors. The child cries out for attention. Even when her call is not heard, the adult feels the effects.

A pause, to understand.

Throughout life, a child has needs that, when met, affect her quality of life. Failing to meet them produces, little by little, fissures in that child’s survival equipment.

Often, to bear the pain, adults choose to ignore the presence of the inner child. And they go on with life, automatically and frenetically, using substitutes to supply those ignored needs. It is common for emotional fissures to be covered over with things, controls, power, violence, riches, food, sex and other palliatives. But none of that works.

In ignoring the pain, the adult loses, at once, the wondering gaze and the possibility of perceiving other adults fully. Look: if I ignore my child, I lose the ability to see the child in other adults. Relationships lose their poetry, their charm, the nourishment of unequivocal love that children so need and so are able to give. Life turns cold.

And there the child stays, in the adult’s mental attic, waiting.

She waits to be seen, recognized, valued, remembered, welcomed, embraced, made to feel welcome, like every child. She also waits to see the adult’s face light up on seeing her! “You are welcome, my overflowing love is yours, I love you just as you are!”

The child waits to be heard, to speak of what she needs, of what she feels, of fears and sadnesses, restlessness and angers, agonies and anguish. And she waits not to feel helpless, abandoned, alone. And she is there, locked in the adult’s attic, still waiting.

I think perhaps we cannot do much for so many adults who, driven by a wounded inner child, keep hurting. But we urgently need to start doing something, to start now. It is the way, in the future, to have adults with a living, present inner child, coloring the possibilities of the experience of life.

To begin means to stop and listen. To open the door of that attic and say: I’m here! I want to know you. I want to take care of you. Let’s take care together of every fissure, every pain. Together we will rediscover wonder and the strength to meet challenges. They will keep existing! They will not disappear! But we will have more strength and trust to go on.

A relevant gain of this rediscovery is the look of deep respect and welcome the adult will be able to develop in living with the children in their life, both the little ones and those who live in adult bodies.

May the doors of mental attics open: the world is in great need of children’s gaze!

Illustration: watercolor over a drawing by André Masson in Les chevaliers (1927).