When seeing the world becomes less important than letting little people see it.
Daisy and the Sistine Chapel
“Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” came the cry from upstairs, followed by the unmistakable thud-thud-thud of the world’s least demure princess.
My eight-year-old burst into the living room carrying a book. “Look!” she cried, huge trademark beam across her face. “The painting!”
For reasons I’ll only understand by reading it myself, the book she was reading – Daisy and the Trouble With Space by Kes Gray – had a picture of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ll recognise it by sight – it’s the one with God stretching his finger out from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel* in the Vatican.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a smug parent post about an ultra-gifted child who has an innate appreciation for high art. She recognised the painting because she’d seen it in my Rome guide book the day before. She was just excited by the coincidence.
The spark of discovery
What fills me with joy is that she wanted to look at the Rome guide book in the first place. She has wanted to see all the photos from my visit to Rome. She has wanted to hear stories about the Baths of Caracalla, know whether there are still lions in the Colosseum and work out how there’s a church on top of a church on top of a temple in the Basilica di San Clemente.
She has also wanted to get the atlas out to look at a map of Italy, then insisted that I send some photos to her teacher so she can do a show-and-tell on them at school.
Part of this is just wanting to know where Daddy disappeared to for five days, and part of it is that – by pure coincidence – the class has been learning about Italy in geography. But it’s also something deeper than that – a spark inside that finds the world fascinating and wants to discover more about it.
Sacrifices and rewards
When you become a parent, you have to sacrifice a lot of what you love about travel. You can’t go as often, you can’t do as much, bar-hopping isn’t going to happen and itineraries get shaped around what little people will tolerate. A week in an all-inclusive suddenly becomes very appealing as the need for rest and downtime wins out over a desire to explore.
The flipside of these sacrifices is that you get to experience the world through fresh eyes again. A sense of wonder that has been chipped away by decades of been there, done that, returns vicariously.
I’m frequently delighted by how enthusiastically my daughters will want to explore what I see as a mediocre castle ruin. Or how they’ll be excited by a detail in a museum that I thought no-one would care about. Or how they’ll still be asking questions about an ancient site months afterwards.
It’s not always perfect – often I’ll want to linger in places they don’t – but travelling with children does a remarkable job of removing cobwebs from jaded eyes.
Catching the travel bug
I still love exploring, learning new things and being able to wander down little rabbit holes of discovery. But increasingly, the greatest highs and the biggest hits of pleasure come from seeing that love passed on. When my daughter recognises a painting from a guide book or wants to show photos of where Julius Caesar was killed to her classmates, pride is not the overriding emotion. It’s happiness. And, specifically, happiness for her that she has caught the bug that has given me so much joy over the years.
Suddenly, nurturing that curiosity and desire for discovery has become a thousand times more important than ticking any particular place off my own bucket list. I may never see Machu Picchu or the Galapagos or Antarctica, but opening two sets of young eyes to the possibilities of what they might see gives me incalculably greater pleasure.
* Note: I did not love the Sistine Chapel.
