dailyO
Politics

We all need to be children again

Advertisement
Valson Thampu
Valson ThampuMay 09, 2016 | 16:49

We all need to be children again

The existential disability we suffer today is on account of disowning the infant in us.

Here is freedom, as I understand it. It is the courage, the cheek - if you like - to retrace our steps in time and become like children yet again. Freedom, in the adult world, is a teasing illusion. But freedom is not dead, for all that. It is reassuringly, refreshingly real in the world of infants.

So, welcome to the simplicity and spontaneity of childlikeness. Do check, however, on your courage quotient. Pure freedom - the like of which infants enjoy - is not for cowards and hypocrites. It is far more heroic than the courage to hate, to spite and to kill.

Advertisement

As adults, we are struggling in the world we have created for ourselves. Where thousands commit suicide. Millions live in fear, misery and hunger. Humankind groans under the burden of meaninglessness.

Impoverished by our acquisitions, defeated by our victories. None of our problems is extraterrestrial. Every one of them is man-made. Yet, everyone thinks of oneself as a victim. So we are; but victims of our own enterprises.

Ever tried looking at our world through the eyes of a child? It's a difficult thing. We are too fixed in our ways to be able to do this. A child wonders why we, the adults, are so odd and awkward in our ways?

Why we are in chains, as Rousseau said, in a free society? Why we cannot see obvious things, like our not doing what we profess? Why we ruin our country, even as we flaunt our patriotism?

7-awesome-places-to-_050916040905.jpg
We are struggling in the world we have created for ourselves. 

Why popular and powerful leaders have to be so heavily protected against the people? Why, in a society where all are equal, some are more equal? And so on.

Now consider how we see children? As under-developed adults? We see them in terms of what they lack, not who they are.

Advertisement

Consider this paradox. Every parent watches joyfully over the minutest signs of a child's growth. Each milestone is rejoiced over.

Soon thereafter, their own children, now a grown-up, break their hearts. All the same, it occurs to none that parents could have scripted their own tragedy by raising children, conditioning them to be street-smart players in a society that is heartlessly adult. It is as though they are paying us back for decoying them into a jungle that we call adulthood.

We are the victims of our idea of growth. For us, growth is getting adept at the ways and games of the adult world. Our greatest excitements over our infants have been about their talking and behaving like adults. We were so eager! We would have been happier if our infants had leapt out of their cradles and become CEOs of multinational corporations.

Seen through adult eyes, this seems logical. But, occasionally it flashes through the clouds of conformity that this exacts a heavy price. That it is a bad bargain. We wish we could go back and start all over again.

Advertisement

Shades of the prison house, says Wordsworth, lengthen over the growing infant. The light of happiness fades on him. The sadness of it catches up with the rest of us as well.

It is a suicidal notion that a child, in the process of growing up, needs to shed childlikeness. That to be adult is to smother the child in us. That being spontaneous is risky. Being street-smart is the thing to be.

And this, despite Sigmund Freud's insight that the greatest duty of a human being is: to keep the "immortal infant" alive in oneself. We die as human beings, when the infant in us is violated.

Every one of our enjoyable activities connects us to the child lost somewhere within us. It is the child in us that dances, sings, paints, plays. How can theatre be an adult thing? Only the infant in us can lend itself to the sort of make-believe that theatre requires.

Can an adult, as adult, believe that an ordinary fellow dressed like Ashoka is really Emperor Ashoka? Only a child in us can. Even sex is healthy only in its childlikeness. Adult sex borders on rape.

Marriage is freedom. Freedom for what? Is it not the freedom to let man and woman be children to each other? Where this childlike freedom is absent, marital rape lurks behind the arras.

Sadly, today husband and wife are no longer playmates. So they abuse, cheat and hurt each other. If only they would afford for themselves an ounce of childlikeness!

The adult can borrow curiosity only from child. The geniuses who have unpacked the impossible were those who managed to preserve, somehow, their childlike curiosity. The great servants of humanity, likewise, were empowered by their childlike responsiveness.

You and I have not forgotten the beauty and joy of an infant's responsiveness towards us, before we managed to snuff it out! Gradually, its brightness bedimmed and the light was snuffed out by gusts of adulthood.

The spiritual luminaries of the world too were childlike. They carried into their adulthood that profound sense of oneness that infants alone feel with the world as a whole.

The way we nurtured our children caricatured growth. Growth is predicated on balance. If one of our hands grows, and the other does not, the result is disability, not growth.

The existential disability we suffer today is on account of disowning the infant in us. It is because we are too adult-like, and too little childlike, that aberrations of adulthood- cruelty, corruption, covetousness, various forms of inhumanity- erupt from us.

Only the power of childlikeness can safeguard our humanity and ward of demons of adult depravity.

Last updated: April 09, 2018 | 19:44
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy