|
The world
of children, compared to the world of adults, is like an inverted
pyramid. It has a way, a style, and a perspective, which
is very different, at times even opposed to the perspective
of us ‘grown-ups’. Children look at things and events very
differently and many times we grownups do not understand this
perspective. I realized
this as I interacted with my own two little daughters and
with other children. I began to see more and more that children
have to offer to us adults a lot; that they are worthy teachers
who see, sense and appreciate many things that we adults usually
fail to see.
One of the very first and
probably the most striking quality of children that I noticed was that
these amazing human entities possess an unmatched sense of wonder in all
things of life. A child is a wonder struck being who sees, senses and
appreciates mystery and becomes wonder struck in things big and small.
This appreciation and fascination extends to the realm of the very
insignificant, even to the seemingly useless, like bottle caps and pieces
of toys rather than complete (and expensive!) toys.
|
|
For a child to become
excited and mesmerized by things, it does not always take the moon or
an elephant, but a pebble, a stone, a broken dried up twig, a bubble.
We adults are fully aware of the volley of questions shot at us by
this wonder struck philosophic entity, the human person with an
actively alive mind and a growing passion for reality around him.
“Mama what is this?” “Papa why is this like this?” So the chanting
goes on and on. This is the child’s way to express his sense of
enchantment and wonder, his nature to seek, to know and to relate. It
is a quest for expansion and meaning. The child is rooted in the
reality around him and explores it and extracts from it all that adds
to him and expands his knowledge and experience.
|
This led me to think about us adults and about our sense of wonder in
things of life. I remember that many times when I used to get attractive
and expensive toys for my daughters, sooner or later, they would leave
these and would begin to focus on something very insignificant and on
something that was not even a toy! Sometimes this used to frustrate me.
But then I slowly realized that the problem was not with them. It was with
me. Infact it was not a problem at all. It was a ‘clash’ between their
(children’s) sensitivity to and hunger for the reality around them
that led to a sense of wonder and appreciation and created a capacity for
imagination in them, and the dryness, lack of wonder and imagination and
indifference of the adult that I was.
A child is nascent and fresh, straight from the creator’s anvil. He is
hungry and eager. He has that inner space that is a pre-requisite to any
growth and expansion of a person’s being. The child is like a black hole
absorbing, assimilating and integrating reality into his being. He is a
captive to the force of wonder and imagination. This state of the child
and the ‘grown-up ness’ of us adults do not match. They are incompatible.
This is what was reflected in my frustration.
Contrary to this wonder-struck state of the child, we ‘grown-ups’
become so familiar with things around us that we completely loose
freshness and newness in relating with them. Our inner space seems to
become stuffed with the cares of the rat race that we find ourselves to be
in. We become robots that perform human-like functions. We run and run
this rat race with more and more seepage of our mannishness i.e. the
dimensions that make us different and superior to machines and animals.
Let me ask you that when was the last time that you went to your garden
and took sometime to admire the plants and the flowers that you got
planted?
When was it the last time
that you looked at the fishes in your aquarium and fed them yourself
rather than asking someone else to do feed them for you? What about the
wonder of that miracle called language, something that we employ
practically every moment? We have become too passive even in our
entertainments; we would rather sit in an armchair and clap at the goal
scored by someone else (and clap at the thrill that he experiences!) than
go out into the football field ourselves and get a taste of that thrill
and wonder first hand! We have indeed lost this art of experiencing
wonder. It is as if our personalities have undergone a mechanization and
loss of organicity. It is as if personality and personhood do not matter
to us any more! We have become materialized and lifeless.
When we begin to loose this child-like sense of wonder and adventure in
life, we loose something much more critical along with it. We undergo
what I will call a ‘design mutation’. By this I mean that we humans were
originally made to possess certain child-like dimensions or child-like
parameters or qualities, including a very basic sense of wonder. This was
our design. But now there seems to have been immense erosion in this
child-like sense of wonder and other child-like dimensions and we have
undergone a ‘design mutation’ i.e. a mutation has taken place in our
original design. This mutation, this distortion in us, in our psyche has
led to a whole lot of psychological and relational problems. These in turn
have only become multiplied and more glaring in our modern times.
I believe
that child-likeness is a critical key to the adult’s mental
health for in the child, there are principles, there are
paradigms that take us (at least to some extent) to the state
which humans were designed to possess in the very first place.
The child’s carefree attitude to things in life, his inner
space to enjoy and appreciate the reality around him, his
humility and capacity to accommodate insults directed to him
and finally his simple heartedness out of which come out sparks
of truth and purity are some dimensions that we adults and
‘grownups’ have lost. As a consequence of this loss, we have
become deficient in ourselves, in our make up and have become
poor and empty. I believe that a return to some of these child-like
dimensions is very much the need of the hour, especially in
our sick modern age. Child-likeness is the paradigm that we
ought to adopt. Let us adopt it.
|
