The floor isn’t normally a surface I interact with. I interact with the seat of a chair, the top of a desk, and even the keys of a keyboard… but I don’t often interact with the floor. Occasionally I even deal with walls, but not the floor. This is completely different from my son. He’s constantly interacting with the floor. It’s not just because he’s quite short. Or, rather, not entirely. Gravity is a powerful force and he learns physics every day by watching things fall to the ground when he lets go of them. This is the reason that our son finds balloons so fascinating. They break the laws of physics as he currently understands them. They are something strange in his world. Gravity, in other words, keeps things of interest on the ground.
If the thing our son is interested in isn’t on the ground then it is on top of something that is on top of something else that is on the ground. This is some weird form of truth. Even the ceiling fan, he now realizes, is held by the ceiling, which is attached to the walls, that connect to the floor. This is a somewhat complex thing to realize for a child. The ground literally ground things. I didn’t realize how true that was until I got down on the ground to play with my son throughout the day recently. This extended stint on the ground made me realize that the perspective from the ground is truly remarkable. We see things differently and we also see different things. A whole new world was opened up to me.
The world that was opened was the world of the floor. All of the sudden the grains in the floor are artworks, the dust in the corner frightening, and the squeak in the door music. The view from the floor is a view of wonder. Try it out sometime.