It sounds like a Billy Collins poem, but today, it’s an observation about abstract concepts.
When Sylvan and I go for walks, I like to point out the objects along the way and talk about them. Usually, the objects we see are mundane and straightforward, at least to Sylvan: truck, dog, tree, bird, light. Sylvan understands these objects. He even has words for them and will point them out to me, repeatedly and unprompted.
The other day we passed a parking meter, and Sylvan was giving it a look, so I tried to explain. “That’s a parking meter. When you’re driving your car and you want to park, you put money into the meter, and you get to park for an amount of time based on the amount of money that you put into the meter.” That’s when I realized that a parking meter is a much different class of object from a truck or a dog. Especially a dog.
While a parking meter appears to be an ordinary inanimate object, certainly less complicated than a truck or a dog, just the opposite is true. Understanding a parking meter requires understanding, at minimum, two abstract concepts that many adults don’t even grasp: money and time. A parking meter’s function is to turn money, an abstract concept whose true meaning and value eludes most people, into time, an even more abstract concept that eludes even more of us.
These are the things you learn when you walk with a one-year-old child.