Elders love to preach to kids – don’t we? We feel we know much more than those tiny beings and we tend to keep teaching the little ones how to live. It satisfies the adult ego to pour out volumes of advice to those spongy minds.
Its in our blood, I guess, that we should advice kids. Maybe its parental instinct. We see a kid doing something which we think is wrong and start off. Even if a kid did something right, we start of about how it could be done better. If the child isn’t doing anything, we start off about how he or she should be doing something. We tell active children to slow down and slow ones to speed up.
Elders just can’t let Kids be!
And one recent Sunday this paradox struck me. True, kids don’t know a lot of things. I compiled a brief list below:
- Sadness
- Hate
- Holding grudges
- Lying
- Worrying
- Unkindness
- Fear
- Depression
- Selfishness
- Anger
Isn’t it an interesting list?
An elder knows all these and somewhere in our advice, we pass on these accumulations to children. If we look at how we picked up these tendencies in our journey from childhood to adulthood, we will find some elders’ well-meant advice or “knowledge sharing” behind it.
Children have been made pure and simple, innocent, excited, loving, loveable. That is how Nature has designed the human race. Rather than living our lives on this basis, we tend to reverse the design of Nature and downgrade the beauty Nature instilled in us at our birth.
What an elder ought to do is:
- Reflect how one imbibes these undesirable qualities.
- Observe children who are unexposed to the aforesaid negative tendencies.
- Learn from them to live life in all happiness.
Kids are made this way to remind us of how happy it is to be free of vices.
We were made that way, is it too hard to go back to be that way?
Subhash Iyer 