My youngest daughter Lottie lost another tooth this week. It was a moment of celebration for the family but also a lesson in how we each see life through our own individual lens. At 8, Lottie still lives in a magical world with fairies and unicorns being just as real to her as you or I. She carefully made a bed for the tooth fairy to sleep on once she’d made her delivery and was soon fast asleep. Her older sister challenged us with her belief that the tooth fairy isn’t real and Daddy will have to write a note to Lottie and put some money under her pillow. Her reality is different to Lottie’s and has been since the day she was born. She lives firmly in the physical plane – things don’t exist unless they can be seen and touched – and my constant message of “just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there” tends to fall on deaf ears. Ever the pragmatist though, she will always buy into the belief that once you stop believing in Father Christmas / the Tooth Fairy they will cease to bring you gifts. So, for the moment, we have one believer and one doubter.
Pondering the right or wrong of encouraging the children to believe in magic, in fairies, in things that may or may not exist got me thinking about the nature of reality. When we see a rock we imagine it as a solid object yet we know from quantum physics that actually, inside the rock is more space and nothingness than we can imagine. I know people who have been lucky enough to encounter fairies or who are intuitively in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. Who am I to tell my children what to believe? What do I know? I know that reality changes as we change. I know this for sure. As I resolve the pain I carry inside me the outer circumstances of my life transform immediately as if by magic. I know that nature has an intelligence, a rhythm, an order to it that we can tune into when we are able to get out of our heads and into our hearts. I know that we live in an abundant universe that will fill our cup – whether that cup is the size of a pinprick, a thimble, a bowl or an ocean is up to us. So the myth of the tooth fairy, of Father Christmas, is to me an important one. It teaches us to believe in something beyond what appears to be reality. It encourages us to follow the law of attraction and trust that what we truly need to be the best version of ourselves will be provided to us if we trust, if we believe, and if we allow ourselves to receive. We can learn this lesson from our children. We can find and nurture the magical child within us. And who knows, like Lottie, we may one day meet the fairies. I certainly hope that I will!
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