Walking on the beach with a small child of about four or five. She told me I was big and she was small. She looked at the ocean and said, "Big." She asked, "Where does the ocean came from?" I told her it came from rain. She said, "But rain is so small."

She climbed up on my shoulders to see further out over the water. She said, "I am bigger than you now, but the ocean is bigger than everything." I told her that there was something bigger, it is called the universe, and I pointed up to the sky. She looked up for a moment and said, "I don't know about the universe, but I can see the ocean and it is big."

She looked up and asked, "What is the universe?" and I responded, "The universe is everything."

She stared thoughtfully and said, "Everything is big."


I looked into that child's eyes and realized... her mind was bigger than mine.