Children / the maturing desire for the new.

Children develop in response to experience. Typically, the view of this is of a “conditioning” process (which lends itself to and has been typically interpreted as a metaphor of plasticity and material shaping).

As has been observed, at a certain point, children at some point require new stimuli to remain engaged with the presented objects or else they begin to lose interest. Typically seen, this diminished-engagement-over-time is a loss of an ability, which lends itself to the interpretation that most conditioning happens to us as children, and that we somehow “harden” in our plasticity as we grow.

While this is a useful, and standard way to view development, I would like to propose a different interpretation of this process in line with the idea of the ever-increasing gift and an emulation of Christ’s maturation that we are called to.

To wit, the interpretation I would like to offer is that we have a hunger for newness and innovation which grows as we do – we learn to consume experiences with greater rapidity, much as we do food, and a mature person will be seeking this newness to offer the gift of engagement-towards in increasingly subtle ways throughout a maturing life.

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