When you're eight years old nothing is your business.

The great Lenny Bruce, a prophet of truth clothed in laughter, once said, “When you’re eight years old, nothing is your business.” At first, these words sound light, almost casual, as if he were merely recalling childhood with a shrug. Yet beneath this simplicity lies a deep reflection on innocence, ignorance, and the passage from purity to awareness. Bruce, the rebel comedian of the twentieth century, spoke often of the veil between childhood and adulthood — of how the world teaches us to care too much for things that do not belong to us, to fill our hearts with worry, pride, and judgment. His words remind us that once, long ago, we were untouched by such noise — that there was a time when life was simply life, and not a ledger of concerns.

When he said that “nothing is your business,” Bruce spoke of the holy ignorance of youth, that sacred state in which the soul is free from the burdens of power and pretense. The child of eight does not yet divide the world into right and wrong, rich and poor, worthy and unworthy. He does not yet clutch at the illusion of control. He plays, he wonders, he laughs — and in that laughter is a wisdom older than empires. The ancients would have called this state of being Elysian, a peace born not from knowledge, but from the absence of self-consciousness. It is the divine forgetfulness before the storm of ego.

In the writings of the old sages, there is a recurring theme: that enlightenment is not the gaining of new understanding, but the return to innocence. Lao Tzu, the old master of the Tao, once said that the wise man seeks to become again as a child — to see without judgment, to act without striving. Lenny Bruce, though his stage was modern and his tone irreverent, spoke the same truth in the language of the street. To be eight years old, in his meaning, is to live unentangled — not yet weighed down by fear of others’ opinions or the endless entanglement of “business,” that word of ownership, envy, and control.

Consider the life of Helen Keller, who, though blind and deaf, learned to perceive the world through touch and spirit. When she was a child, before she knew the names of things, she lived in a state of pure wonder — a world not of business, but of being. Only when language entered her life did she come to understand how vast, and sometimes cruel, the world of adults could be. Yet even then, she preserved the child’s heart, and it was this heart that allowed her to speak not only with the intellect but with the soul. The lesson of her life and Bruce’s jest are the same: that the freedom of childhood is not something we outgrow — it is something we must learn again.

The modern world, filled with noise and competition, tells us that everything is our business — that we must have opinions on every matter, defend every cause, own every truth. But this is an illusion that steals our peace. The child, unburdened by such delusions, simply observes. He does not rush to fix the sky when it rains, nor take offense at the wind. He does not carry the weight of the world’s chaos in his heart. In that stillness lies power — not the power to dominate, but the power to see clearly. Bruce’s jest is not mockery; it is a plea to remember that clarity.

Thus, the teaching is this: release what does not belong to you. The affairs of others, the judgments of strangers, the noise of the crowd — these are not your business. Attend instead to the child within you, whose gaze is open and whose joy is not tied to possession or status. Speak only when your words bring light, act only when your heart is calm. When you learn to live this way, you rediscover the sacred simplicity of being eight years old — not naive, but free.

So let each of us return, in spirit, to that age of untroubled heart. Let us lay down the burden of endless business — the gossip, the worry, the control — and stand once more in wonder before the vastness of life. To be eight again is not to be small, but to be whole. It is to remember that the world, before it became our concern, was already beautiful. And when we live from that truth, laughter returns — the laughter of Lenny Bruce, yes, but also the laughter of every soul that has remembered how to simply be.