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 1st, 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. :)
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