I think children are intuitively capable of grasping wisdom as readily as adults are. There’s the kind of practical wisdom that we encounter every day that children need to know about. They need to know that we’re actually you know, that if you put your hand on a hot stove you’re going to be burned. They need to figure out how the world works so they look to us to know how that works. It’s very important for us to impart this practical wisdom.
I also think that we have an opportunity to offer up what I call prudential wisdom, it’s a sense of your relationship to those things that you can’t change, and sometimes it manifests as a spiritual wisdom or a spiritual teaching. Zen Shorts seemed like a perfect place to offer these stories.
It’s very important to me not to offer something that’s going to inoculate them from their own experience. I want children to recognize that what they’re actually going through is valuable. Their experience of something is important to the way they’re going to look at the world. It would not work if the stories were more didactic. They need to be offered in such a way that kids can take them or leave them, and perhaps if they don’t understand something, return to it.
I’ve actually had that happen a bunch where kids will maybe come to the story first of all just because it’s a giant panda, but then return to it because it’s created a kind of itch in their mind and they can’t quite understand it or it actually, it flies in the face of what they think. By returning to it and considering it and mulling it over they have a chance to come to a new understanding of how things are.