Children are brilliant. They ask deep questions (at random, with no preamble and usually when you’re in the middle of something scintillating like the washing up or driving to a swimming lesson) that force you to present your answer in a tangible way, reframing your opinion or even consciously considering a topic for the first time.

My eldest son, age 7 ½, is intrigued by infinity. He's still wrapping his head around it as a concept in a world of concrete numbers (he appears delighted by fractions) and thanks to his gentle probing, it’s opened up a debate in my cerebral cortex too. Thinking about it has had the effect of giving me gentle and not unpleasant vertigo as I ponder being set in motion along the ‘lazy eight’.

Infinity can be couched in mathematical, physical, metaphysical and theological terms but one of the most striking recent discoveries for me, by the happy accident of meeting a Cheltenham-based artist, sculptor David Baldwin, contemplating the Möbius loop in a range of pieces including a vast sphere of lapis lazuli, is its associations with the colour blue.

You don’t need to be an expert in colour theory to understand the link. Our immediate, natural reference points of sea and sky give us that feeling of limitlessness, of being transported beyond ourselves by something and to something ‘bigger’. But they achieve this in completely different ways, the sea by endlessly swirling and folding in on itself, the sky by stretching on and out and away from the earth’s surface.

Water is immersive. It’s calming and cooling, helps reestablish equilibrium (even if we can lose our balance quite spectacularly within it) and allows for a connection to the core.  The sky is expansive. It’s inspirational and stimulating and whether you stop at the stratosphere or take a bent toward the celestial it’s no wonder that the colour blue is also connected with intelligence and imagination.

How wonderful that two such different representations of infinity can be so equally relatable and compelling, and a useful tool when circling back to the unexpected deep question from an inquiring young mind. Following my conversation with David Baldwin I asked my son to choose a colour when thinking about infinity. He didn’t have a ready answer, but my allusion to blue and to the sea and sky made immediate sense to him.

My son also asks me about death – he’s well aware of his late maternal grandparents who are an accepted, even welcomed, topic of conversation – and about what it’s like to be a grown up, a question he’s refined himself from an initial query of what my ‘favourite thing’ about this curious and as yet unknown, for him, life stage is.

My reply about the broad realities of adulthood usually includes a discussion of balancing opportunities with responsibility and it’s only writing this that I realise choice is at the fulcrum. I must make a mental note to use a seesaw to help explain this. Death is more complex to talk about, but I bring in a bit of low level genetics coupled with a hint that those that love us never really leave us (which helpfully is also a Harry Potter quote).

Getting on a child’s wavelength isn’t always easy, it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to get there. But once you see things through their eyes it’s like looking for the first time. Putting ourselves back in our child’s brain allows us to understand things on a purer, more instinctive level, like taking a holiday from adult life and arriving back there refreshed and more in tune with the universe and its infinite possibilities.