Frozen is a really excellent example of what children can teach us.

It’s a ridiculous, largely saccharine bit of earnestness so sweet and cloying that it makes my teeth hurt. But wow, I love it. I’ve probably listened to the soundtrack a hundred times in the past month. Roby’s not sick of it, and neither am I. Abby is, and that’s fair. But I’m not.

I have cried listening to Let It Go.

Not because of the content or the quality of the song, necessarily, but simply from imagining the access children have to its earnestness.

I watched the first half of The Brutalist a few nights ago and man, I judged the hell out of that movie.

Pfft. Modernism is lame.

Pffft. Adrian Brody’s nose.

Pfffffft. Philadelphia?

Pft. Patrons.

Pfft. Helvetica and a sideways crawl?

Every single thing was met with judgment and all that judgment did was put up a wall between me and the love imbued into that work of art by the makers.

What did I trade that love for? A feeling of superiority and pride?

That’s a lame trade.

Children make no such exchanges.

They love what they love and they do it with their whole hearts. They love simply and completely and without judgment of what they love, or, and perhaps more importantly, of themselves for loving it.

My co-worker Byron explained that he had a party of young girls with his daughter at the time Frozen was coming out and they were all so charged up by that song that they were stomping and sining and they left actual dents in the drywall, these nine year olds.

The dents are still there, something like a decade later.