When I first met Joseph Chilton Pearce we discussed how bonding creates an intimate channel of communication through which shared meaning flows. Oh, if we were only mindful of the deeper meaning of the meaning we share.

The mother's name for the object, and her emotional state are built into the structure of knowledge of the object the child creates. All without any evaluation on the part of the child.

This obvious, but not so obvious, observation opens to a much larger developmental force - state specific learning and performance. The emotional state of an experience is woven into the body and the intellectual memory of each experience. Each of the primary brain centers - thought, feeling and action - resonate an internal image or state of each experience. We call the composite image or state memory. In truth there is a separate memory unique to each major brain center. Stimulate the physical brain and the associated emotional and symbolic images-states are reincarnated, or, as we say, re-membered as a latent experience of the original event. What we abstract as thought is just that, an abstraction. What is primary is the state. Some states cripple; feeling observed, compared, judged. Some provide the optimum context for learning and performance; what we call original or authentic play in which psychological failure is not part of the experience.

Until age five or six early child’s play is 90% self-play. The child may be with other children or an adult who are doing similar activities, but the focus of the child’s play is still personal. Group play requires a number of children act out the same story together, that they pretend to be the King or Queen, or the Frog Prince. This is very complex, abstract. The early child is concrete in their play. Nearly all play during the early years involves story, sensory experience, touch and movement.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent that this precious moment we call early-childhood will never come again. Never. This moment is over, pushed aside by a new moment. It was just a blink ago that Carly Elizabeth would announce that she needed to pee. “A pee party,” we celebrated as I walked her to the potty. She would sit on her potty and I on mine. It was, indeed, a pee or poop party. Yesterday, when she announced that it was ‘that’ time, she added, “I will – alone,” and that is what she did. An era had come to an end. As we celebrate each new milestone we often miss the ending of what was – now – just a memory and it happens every day.

If my worth as a father and parent can be measured, let it be by the smiles and laughter Carly Elizabeth, my wife Z and I share together. I happen to be fond of the Buddhist tradition where one, with conscious intent, negates suffering in ourselves and therefore in others. Joseph Chilton Pearce and I often shared the irony that most of our suffering is self-inflicted. In the East there are two icons for wisdom, the Contemplative Buddha and the Happy Buddha. In a casual way we can say that negating suffering leads to happiness, that ultimate wisdom is happiness.