What a 3 year old child can teach us

Children are one of the most beautiful creation of nature. Their innocence, curiosity, beauty, naughtiness can melt any heart. Spending time with a child is the perfect stress buster, a child will take you in some other world and you will leave your notion of the real world, all your problem, issues that are bothering you behind when you are playing with a children. You are just a character in his play, a part of his imagination, a puppet in his hands, you follow what he orders and you enjoy obeying to him/her. I spent a lot of time with my nephew in past few days and he taught me some very valuable lessons.

Forgiving: Children never hold grudges against anyone. You might scold them, tease them, do not give them what they want and that will make them very angry. You may even make them cry but they will forgive you soon and forget everything in a moment. Children do not have any grudge against anyone. They will play with you in the same cheerful manner as they always do and there won’t be any impact of past next time when you engage with a children. They truly forget and forgive and thus they do not carry any negativity, if only we can put behind the complaints we have against people, we can also live a very happy life without carrying any baggage.

Being Curious: It’s but obvious that children are most curious being on the planet, not only human children but children of any species are always wondered by the amazing world around them and they want to experiment with it in any way they can. Once they learn to speak, children can really annoy you with all kinds of question and they will keep asking same questions again and again though you have replied countless time. But I guess that is the reason of their learning, as we grow up we just stop asking questions. We do not find anything incredible or wonderful, we just have a feeling of indifference. On many occasions, we just feel shy, inferior or extremely uncomfortable in asking anything. Our learning stops as soon as we stop being curious. I think children teach us to keep asking questions, to keep wondering about everything around the world, to keep expanding our knowledge and learning new things.

Optimum utilization of resources: As we grow up, we want specific tools for everything else we don’t start doing our work. But lack of resources is not something that bothers a child. In his world of imagination, rules are quite flexible, anything can become anything. A truck can become an ambulance, a garbage truck, a police truck, a boat and it may fly also sometimes. It can talk if it has too else it will just honk its horn. Animals can replace one another, they can talk if they have to else they are just statues. A simple cardboard box can become a palace, a truck, a boat or a UFO whatever purpose a child find fit for it. Steel glasses are building blocks for palaces and fortress, headphones can become stethoscope, and humans can become anything. You may be a friend of the child helping him in his mission or an enemy who is destined to get killed someplace. I think we should also be flexible and imaginative like child instead of being so rigid on our demands and that can help a lot when it comes to chase our dreams.

Make New friends: Children are great at making friends, they can make friends across ages and they do not hesitate in initiating for new relationships. Although many times they act quite selfish in terms of not sharing their toys or food but that is part of growing up. As time demands, they form bonds quite quickly and play like they are brothers/sisters forever. As we grow up, we feel safer in our established close friend circle and we stop giving chances to people and also we stop trying to many more friends.

Be Honest about your fears: Children do not try to act smart and conceal their fear. They are quite open about it as they are yet to get ‘wise’ enough to judge what an acceptable fear is and what is not. They may be afraid of the moon, the old guy next door, the loud aunty across the street, or the small insect that has no idea what he is doing on the wall. But children will express their fear openly and given some encouragement they also face their fear and get over it. As we grow up, we start hiding our fears be it failures to accomplish our goals, not able to approach our love, getting fat, being depressed and we never let anyone to encourage us to get over them and we are stuck forever in them getting suffocated internally.

Live in present: I think this is the biggest thing we can learn from a children. A child does not live in either past or future. He exists entirely in the present, he has no memory of what he did in the past and he is not bothered about what he is going to do in future and that’s why they are always happy, cheerful, optimistic and excited about life. They do not carry any baggage. They are at peace at what they are right now but as soon we grow up half the time we are in past and remaining half we are worrying about future and thus little is left to enjoy about the future.

Simplify the world around you: Kids don’t believe in complicating the world much, they keep it simple. They believe the purpose of living is to play, play with anything they can get in hand, they talk in simple language, if they don’t understand a word they will make a new word for it and then the entirely family has to use that vocabulary. Now it makes the shopkeeper quite puzzled when we ask him to give us ‘bhui’ which is the word coined by my nephew for cars or ‘konoya’ in place of ‘khilona’ but it works for him and it works for us also these days. We should also simplify the world around us if we can’t understand its complexity, redefine few things according to our own convenience and live happily.

Saying No: Nobody says NO quickly with absolute emotionlessness than kids. If they won’t to, they won’t share their chocolate or toys with you and they would abruptly say No to you making a mockery of you in front of many. Such an important quality some of us later forgot and found us extremely uncomfortable to utter this simple word which led us into multiple troubled situations. Keep it simple, say no if you don’t want to do anything and there will be peace in life.

Laugh & be happy: Children have the purest form of happiness, unperturbed from anything, their smile is the most innocent feeling in the world and they laugh wholeheartedly and they actively find reasons to laugh. A children can be happy if he gets chocolate, cake, a new toy, a ride on bike, on watching a stupid cartoon, someone making weird expression or at times on nothing, they are genuinely happy from inside. It’s such a cruel reality that we kill these happiness later by all the expectation we put on them and ruthlessly make them run into the race of life else every children can teach us to find happiness in small joys of life and celebrate them.

I think we face 2 big responsibilities now. First to revive the inner child in us that we mercilessly killed to become successful, mature, acceptable and whatever pretence we have to do to make a place in society. We have to learn to be happy again, learn to do things that makes us happy, learn to become immature and learn to stop thinking much about consequences all the time. At the same time, we have these tremendous task of saving children of these generation to become the rats in many of the races we want them to run. We have to stop making a champion out of them in everything. 

Parents start competition so early; our child learn to walk 1^st, our child learn to speak first, it looks so stupid that children are being ruthlessly converted into ‘trophy child’ and they are another ‘showpiece item’ to flaunt. We have to let them live like children, let them score 70%, let them play in garden and let them waste time on top of the roof gazing stars, let them be the creator of the future instead of making them programmed robots first in school and then in workplaces.

We have this incredible task of preserving smiles of all the children and I hope by doing so we will be able to meet our own inner child. :) 

Turning 25..........

Let’s rewind our clock a bit, when we were child, small height, very less power, we often used to dream about growing up as soon as we can. There is always a relative frame of reference, when we were in 2^nd standard we thought that 5^th standard students were really big and huge, they must be pretty intelligent too. When we reached 7^th standard, 5^th standard appeared to be stupid infants while 10^th standard students looked like super intelligent and super powerful. Then we reached, 1^st year of college and 10^th standard students appeared like dumb kids worrying over useless issue like board exams while final year students seemed to have got everything sorted, most of them had jobs and gf/bf and a well-planned life ahead.

When we reach final year we realize the irony the world is, we are as clueless about life as we were in 10^th standard or 3^rd standard, we still compete with the same bunch of people we were competing forever, sharma ji ka ladka still tops and yet he doesn’t become Einstein, Verma ji ka ladka is gold medalist in swimming yet he is worried about job and future, the charming guitarist also struggle with making a future and we escape from reality one more time and dream about an age where everything is settled.

25 seems like a milestone, a checkpoint, a year of introspection, I turned 25 few days back and I am revisiting all the pages of my life to compare the deviation of real version from the ideal version imagined at different points of life. It’s quite unfortunate I didn’t become a high flying hardcore WWE champion with a bad ass entrance music, I also didn’t become the first cricketer to score a triple century in an one day match and took 10 wickets in the same match, I have not even started my first novel far far away from the vivid imagination of living a retired life in outskirts of a hill station living like Ruskin Bond exploring nature and writing about its beauty, even my most practical and realistic dream of completing B.Tech by 21 from an IIT and then finishing MBA from an IIM by 23 and becoming a billionaire in the same year has tossed away. In the real life, I have finished my MBA and will be joining a job soon. Doesn’t look as fancy as I dreamt in childhood and yet I know I am living dream of many and I am grateful about it.

Now all microblogging sites are full of clichéd articles about mid-20s, dilemmas of life, checklist on 25^th year, 10 things to do before turning 30 and stuff and most of them have pretty much similar content. Our present generation at 25 is often stereotyped as unhappy, clueless, directionless, struggling and all kind of other negative adjectives. To some extent it is true also, many of us are indeed directionless. We are supposed to follow our passion which has lately become another cliché but most of us don’t know what that passion is and if we know we don’t know how much practical it is to pursue that passion. A large population went with the flow of doing engineering because that was what everyone was doing and now half of them are chasing the next must do goal of M.Tech/MBA/MS while those who have already done it are wondering whether their life was miserable before or miserable now.

We don’t know our goal is to be happy or to be rich and whether happiness follows money or not. We don’t know we want to spend our weekends with a bunch of friends or enjoying a movie alone eating Maggie. We are confused, that’s a fact because most of us didn’t believe in the iron fist rule of getting educated, searching for a job and then settling down in life. Unlike our previous generations we enjoy a long gap between getting a job and settling down and that is where we wander like lost souls. We fantasize ourselves with the multiple possibilities that exist in our life and the decision paths that could be followed right now and yet when it comes to taking a courageous decision, most of us panic and chicken out. We love and hate our cage of convenience at the same time. It is like the ‘ring of power’, we hate it and yet we can’t afford to lose it though we hate what it has turned us into.

Our generation is also the most masochist one. We are incredibly hard on ourselves to the extent of cruelty. We have reproached ourselves for not scoring 90% in boards, we have cursed ourselves on failing to get admission in our dream college, we feel inferior on gaining weight and getting bald, we always live a comparative life and thus we are also the most unsatisfactory bunch. We are always in a hurry to declare ourselves a loser, be it on not getting the job we desired, or getting rejected by the person we liked or even getting less marks in some stupid tests. Many of us start with a job that gives more money than what our parents are getting towards the end of their working life and yet we don’t feel happy or in many case not even contended. . There is always scope of doing more. That’s what all the books say, that’s what all the sports-persons say, that’s what the message all the inspirational movies give and that is how we were raised from the beginning. To achieve more, always remain hungry, always improve and keep fighting and keep moving. We have wonderfully converted our life into some Japanese anime, we don’t fight physically or with imaginative monsters we just look for better grades, more money and bigger jobs.

We are so much in need of motivation, we instantaneously share the blogs and articles of “It’s ok to feel lost in mid 20s” and stuff, a little empathy is all we seek because we feel that most people wouldn’t understand us. Indeed, it’s tough to explain to your parents why are you unhappy even with a 7 digit salary or to explain to your uncle who is doing the same thing from last 30 years that you don’t feel motivated to go to work as you find no meaning in it. 25 is the age when not being in a relation make you incompetent and inferior in some way. When ‘liking’ the pic of someone flaunting their biceps in gym or someone enjoying a drink in Goa makes you sad. When you are supposed to act in a mature way everywhere while you want to jump on Mickey Mouse in a fair.

May be everything we feel, hear, share is something that was common to all generation, we just have better and fancier platform to share them. May be all generations want to rebel from their previous conventions and yet all are trapped to them. May be the gossips and rants are transferred to whatsapp and facebook from pan addas and barber shops. These questions always ponder me, are we the most complaining and unsatisfied generation or our misery has been publicized much?

I get a weird feeling when I think about the fact that Nadal had already achieved a career grand slam before turning 25, Sachin was already a living legend, Miley Cyrus has already earned millions, people much younger than me are achieving accolades far superior than what I can imagine with my conventional life and yet I know I have my own set of achievements. I appeared in some of the toughest competitive exams; cracked a few, screwed a few; I competed with some of the brilliant minds of the country to get a good college and I also competed with the selected lot again to get a job. I have already travelled a lot of country and many more places are on the list. I have tasted some of the finest cuisine and I will taste more. So far, Bhutan is the only foreign country I have been, but still an achievement, isn’t it? I didn’t write any novel, yet I am managing my blog for more than 7 years.

I think the origin of most of our pain lies in the ‘larger than life’ life we all imagined for us in our youth. Guess, life doesn’t work that way. Your life don’t change much even if you get a great job or an average job. There are always problems, worries, anxieties you have to fight. May be all those who look very happy in their Facebook profile are also fighting with the same, social media is the biggest scam everyone put to appear happy. I have seen people most unhappy once they achieve the biggest goal of their life, then they feel purposeless. May be the crux of the life was all about celebrating the small success, be it losing 5 KG weight, making that cake eatable for the first time in life, travelling in a local train for the first time, writing the story you always want to and get it published, finally summoning the courage to ask that girl out, get rejected, and denounce our attachment with the materialistic world with friends later that night.

May be all of us can’t be the superhero we thought we would become and save the world, or the billionaire that owns 100 cars, maybe we won’t get a girlfriend like Emma Watson or a boyfriend like Ryan Gosling, we won’t have a private Jet. May be life was never supposed to be a fairy tale, it would always be this harsh and illogical, some people will betray us, we would lose things we consider the most important for our survival, we would abandon many of our dreams, we have to change the path many times due to things not in our control, we will fail and we will fail more, we will succeed and yet we won’t feel happy.

The bottom line is, life is as dramatic or as boring as we perceive it to be, let us continue on the path we have created and then get drifted again from it, met new people, lose old people, go to new places, we are just 25, we are still young, we are too inexperienced to proclaim our success and too immature to understand we have failed. However let us never ever abandon things that make us happy no matter how busy or helpless we become. Sing that song, practice that dance, write that story, run that marathon, finish that painting and then do it again. Do not get stuck, soon you will turn 50 and like all the clichéd article says you will definitely regret what you didn’t do when you were 25.