Where has the child gone?
"Forever young, I wanna be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever..."
I would have scoffed at these words five years ago. I used to find it ridiculous when people would declare that 'in their hearts, they would always be 18'. As for '18 till I die' by Bryan Adams--that was laughter therapy for me on really catastrophic days. My close friend, C, used to parade around with a coterie of younger people and himself as the parade captain. Needless to say, I was an ardent member of that coterie.
"You guys keep me young, I feel that life can be more about possibilities than trivialities, that there is still the scope to do something great before we reach the finish line."
I never understood him then. But I do now. Do we rant about being forever young because we want to follow pop culture? On the contrary we do it because it is hard, it is a challenge to sustain that spirit in our minds and our hearts. It is difficult to confront every single day with a dewy perspective, with the thrill of what can be and with the assurance that nothing can stop us on our way to magnificence. A year goes by, maybe 2, then 5 and before we know it we can barely tell each day from the other. Credit card bills, social duties, our jobs, our errands, our houses, our bosses, our stresses, our missed fitness routines--the list of obstacles that limit our ability to think and feel with child-like clarity is endless. These become, perhaps, the embankments that we surround our minds with. Imagination is the flood that transports us to the exhilaration of being alive, of envisioning something removed from physical reality. But where there are embankments, how can there be a flood? The water gets contained as do we.
When I was six, I used to draw with the fervour of a young Da Vinci. More than two decades later, it is a drastically different story. Touching a brush to paper is akin to making the next big discovery in particle physics. There are an umpteen number of inhibitions and the majority of them constitute what we call 'psychological blocks'. Will I be able to draw what I imagine? What if it turns out to be a completely failed attempt? What if I cannot draw something great? This brings us to a crucial question and that question is what makes the most significant distinction between childhood and adulthood--does it matter whether it is great? Am I doing something to achieve a 'great' outcome or simply for the sheer enjoyment of doing it? Children do not sketch rickety figures with the intention of creating the next Monalisa. They draw because they want to and that is what makes them such master of subconscious expression. We, on the other hand, mostly aim for conscious expression where we 'think' of what we want to express. There is no guarantee, however, that we think coincides with what we feel. Subconscious expression remains more or less intact through early youth but miraculously vanishes as we step on to the threshold of adulthood! We rarely relinquish our chains of self-control to delve into the more chaotic arena of emotions which is really what gives rise to our subconscious expression. Eminent pshchologists such as Jung and Freud have suggested rich interpretations of our 'dream worlds' that supposedly are products of our subconscious selves.
Why is the current generation of adults so out of touch with this part of their personalities? How has the importance of the 'great outcome' and the compulsion to be distinguishable among one's peers outstripped the notion of doing anything for the exhilaration that it brings? A large part of our attitude today is governed by our presence on the internet. Our experience are targeted less at actually imbibing something and more at how it enhances our presence on our virtual social and professional networks. This in turn, has led to a cultural bias that favors exhibitionism over experience, interaction with the external world over introspection and peer value propositions over self-judgement and self-correction. A photograph that you click has to be worthy of a certain number of 'likes' on Facebook while a video must appeal to the senses of an indefinite number of strangers on Youtube.
The only way to feel a true sense of accomplishment, of having done/created something of substance is to be 'in your own element' as Ken Robinson puts it. That is unarguably the single most pure and uplifting feeling that you can get, verging on the spiritual. The path to your element essentially is the path to the child within you unless you want to end up as the frog in the well. You have to rediscover that child, nurture it to a youth and let it spread its wings. That child is not fettered by your adult inhibitions or your sense of superiority. Every day is an opportunity for exploration where the world is waiting to be unraveled. To end, let me quote Franz Kafka who has summarized this notion beautifully in the following lines:
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
"Forever young, I wanna be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever..."
I would have scoffed at these words five years ago. I used to find it ridiculous when people would declare that 'in their hearts, they would always be 18'. As for '18 till I die' by Bryan Adams--that was laughter therapy for me on really catastrophic days. My close friend, C, used to parade around with a coterie of younger people and himself as the parade captain. Needless to say, I was an ardent member of that coterie.
"You guys keep me young, I feel that life can be more about possibilities than trivialities, that there is still the scope to do something great before we reach the finish line."
I never understood him then. But I do now. Do we rant about being forever young because we want to follow pop culture? On the contrary we do it because it is hard, it is a challenge to sustain that spirit in our minds and our hearts. It is difficult to confront every single day with a dewy perspective, with the thrill of what can be and with the assurance that nothing can stop us on our way to magnificence. A year goes by, maybe 2, then 5 and before we know it we can barely tell each day from the other. Credit card bills, social duties, our jobs, our errands, our houses, our bosses, our stresses, our missed fitness routines--the list of obstacles that limit our ability to think and feel with child-like clarity is endless. These become, perhaps, the embankments that we surround our minds with. Imagination is the flood that transports us to the exhilaration of being alive, of envisioning something removed from physical reality. But where there are embankments, how can there be a flood? The water gets contained as do we.
When I was six, I used to draw with the fervour of a young Da Vinci. More than two decades later, it is a drastically different story. Touching a brush to paper is akin to making the next big discovery in particle physics. There are an umpteen number of inhibitions and the majority of them constitute what we call 'psychological blocks'. Will I be able to draw what I imagine? What if it turns out to be a completely failed attempt? What if I cannot draw something great? This brings us to a crucial question and that question is what makes the most significant distinction between childhood and adulthood--does it matter whether it is great? Am I doing something to achieve a 'great' outcome or simply for the sheer enjoyment of doing it? Children do not sketch rickety figures with the intention of creating the next Monalisa. They draw because they want to and that is what makes them such master of subconscious expression. We, on the other hand, mostly aim for conscious expression where we 'think' of what we want to express. There is no guarantee, however, that we think coincides with what we feel. Subconscious expression remains more or less intact through early youth but miraculously vanishes as we step on to the threshold of adulthood! We rarely relinquish our chains of self-control to delve into the more chaotic arena of emotions which is really what gives rise to our subconscious expression. Eminent pshchologists such as Jung and Freud have suggested rich interpretations of our 'dream worlds' that supposedly are products of our subconscious selves.
Why is the current generation of adults so out of touch with this part of their personalities? How has the importance of the 'great outcome' and the compulsion to be distinguishable among one's peers outstripped the notion of doing anything for the exhilaration that it brings? A large part of our attitude today is governed by our presence on the internet. Our experience are targeted less at actually imbibing something and more at how it enhances our presence on our virtual social and professional networks. This in turn, has led to a cultural bias that favors exhibitionism over experience, interaction with the external world over introspection and peer value propositions over self-judgement and self-correction. A photograph that you click has to be worthy of a certain number of 'likes' on Facebook while a video must appeal to the senses of an indefinite number of strangers on Youtube.
The only way to feel a true sense of accomplishment, of having done/created something of substance is to be 'in your own element' as Ken Robinson puts it. That is unarguably the single most pure and uplifting feeling that you can get, verging on the spiritual. The path to your element essentially is the path to the child within you unless you want to end up as the frog in the well. You have to rediscover that child, nurture it to a youth and let it spread its wings. That child is not fettered by your adult inhibitions or your sense of superiority. Every day is an opportunity for exploration where the world is waiting to be unraveled. To end, let me quote Franz Kafka who has summarized this notion beautifully in the following lines:
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
