A Precious Moment with My Daughter

Yesterday, as my daughter was home for Children's Day, we found ourselves curled up on the bed reading Alan Watts's illustrated story — a simple tale about a fish searching for something it cannot find. The book's story is straightforward: a little fish, surrounded by the sea, cannot perceive the very thing it swims in.

My daughter's curiosity was immediate. Why, she asked, can't the fish see the sea when it's right there? I tried the analogy of invisible air — we breathe it constantly, yet it remains unseen precisely because it is so close, so present, so fundamental to our existence. The things closest to us are the hardest to see.

The Fish Spinning in Circles

As we turned the pages, the fish began to spin — searching frantically, chasing its own tail in circles, panicking in its inability to find what was always already there. My daughter laughed. She found it genuinely funny, the absurdity of it. She recognised something in that image.

I recognised something too — a mirror to a very adult tendency. How often do we spin in circles, overthinking the mechanics of something we already know how to do? The fish's problem wasn't ability. It was anxiety about the how that prevented the simple act of swimming.

Why Did the Fish Forget?

Her next question was the simplest and the most profound: why did the fish forget how to swim?

It hadn't forgotten, exactly. It had begun to think about swimming rather than swimming. It had stepped outside of its natural knowing and tried to observe itself from the outside — and in that moment of self-consciousness, the effortless became impossible.

Adults do this constantly. We intellectualise what we already know intuitively. We analyse what was once instinctive. And in that analysis, we lose access to the very thing we were looking for.

What Children Know

After we finished the book, my daughter was done with it. She moved on, without ceremony, to her coloring book. I lingered with the moment a little longer.

Children possess something we spend years of adult life trying to recover: an intuitive understanding of the futility of overthinking. They don't need a philosophy of mind or a developmental framework to know that the answer is usually simpler than we make it. They just know — and then they move on.

Reading stories with children is one of the quiet gifts of parenthood. They ask the questions we stopped asking. They notice what we trained ourselves not to notice. And sometimes, in answering their questions, we remember fundamental truths we had somehow set aside.

The sea was always there. It always will be.