Saving The World

The wind catches his cape, which billows momentarily behind him. He is like a flag, solidly planted, declaring this area under his protection. He has a hero’s stance, hands on hips and one knee slightly bent, ready to launch himself into the sky. His head is tipped up as though he is listening, ever alert for the cries of mothers who have lost the grip on their pushchair, only to send their precious darlings into the path of an oncoming bus.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s my three-year-old. Faster than a speeding kitten, more powerful than a tricycle, able to leap tall dandelions in a single bound. My hero.

He is not like other children, that became obvious from a very early age. He never did baby talk; he didn’t ask the usual sort of questions. When he was 4, his voice broke an amiable silence in our car to ask ‘If mummies are born from mummies, where did the first mummy come from?’ Just the first in a long line of mind blowing questions as he explored the dimensions of this world.
That’s how it is. His questions are not like those you would expect from an insider, from a ‘normal’ human being who accepts so much of what goes on around us. He is more like an alien, transported here and trying to understand our world from its most basic natural laws upwards.
Why does the fog look thicker, further away? (He knows, somehow, that it isn’t.) After learning about the water cycle he wants to know how it started. How do bees make honey? No, not the collecting pollen part, the actual physical and chemical process that transforms it. We google, a lot.
There are downsides of course, this remarkable mind uses a lot of his time and energy. It makes him oblivious to much of what goes on around him, leaves us feeling sometimes like we are unimportant. He gets frustrated with other children. He feels that he is different; they feel that he is different.
Some of his teachers love his inquiring mind and creativity, but others find him difficult. He won’t take their word for it, you see, everything has to be tried and tested. I have to fight the urge to be his buffer, to interpret the world for him and explain him to others. I know that he has to learn to live in this world for himself.
Eventually this difference is given a label: Dyspraxia. His brain is not wired like other peoples; he is neuro-diverse. Dyspraxia means he is clumsy at times, struggles to write legibly and is hopeless at spelling. He can’t sequence things easily, can’t plan the best way to pack his school things into a bag, can’t tell you about an event in chronological order.
Dyspraxia also means he makes connections that other people don’t: Did you know GCHQ employs over a hundred dyspraxics as intelligence agents for just that reason?

One day a good friend and I are sitting, watching him and she says that he is a remarkable young man. Then she says something that takes my breath away.
‘He’s going to save the world.’
My expression reflects my surprise, and so she explains, ‘He is so creative, so smart, he sees things so differently.’
We watch as he leads a group of a dozen children in a dashing adventure game, he makes them all shine with glee. No one is forgotten, this game is all inclusive. Suddenly I see him in a new light, as a leader.

I don’t know what the future holds for him. Perhaps he will grow up to be perfectly mundane. Sometimes though, I think back to that three-year-old in the park, so intent on saving the world. I look at the newspapers and all the problems that mankind is facing; financial crises, environmental issues, border disputes, radicalism. I think that maybe, just maybe, kids who think differently, who are wired differently, might be our evolution; our salvation. New brains to have new thoughts, for a new world.