As children we learn to trust the authority of the twin deities called ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ and then, a bit later, that same authority is transferred to the school gods known as teachers. As young children even our friends serve as erstwhile thought leaders, since they shed light into worlds (the homes around us) about which we know nothing.
Note, however, how quickly children – especially as they reach the middle to latter years of elementary school – begin making pronouncements of their own. They’ve been ‘out in the world’ for a bit now, know a thing or two, and they are eager to let everyone know. Upon challenge they, of course, relent, because they simply do not possess the mental ammunition of mom, dad, or even their cagier friends.
But the seal has been broken, the mighty entity known as ‘me’ has announced itself to the world, and by our teens independent thought is fully ours. We have seen through the chicanery of mom and dad, caught a friend or two with pants down, discovered the frailties and vulnerabilities of our teachers.
The World, the Man, the Establishment, is bullshit and we now know different. Our world will be different. It will be honest, raw, authentic – no b.s. for us, thank you very much.
Only, the adult-child in us fails to recognize that we are indeed made of the very same stuff. That the words, the habits, the insecurities and bravery, the language itself – all of it is inherited. That which we call adulthood is little more than a mental crop sown and fertilized (there’s that b.s. again) across youth.
And we don’t even know it because – let’s face it – how would we, unless the instrument of self-inquiry was a part of that upbringing. Alas, our schools, our parents, our culture teach look only outward, ever outward, to be, to do, to become. Thus do “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
All around me I watch well-intentioned parents drag their children from one activity to another – dance, karate, sports, academic tutoring, church – unconsciously informing those fertile young minds that life is in the doing, that who and what they are is to be found out there, in what they do. (Is it any wonder that we adults, by way of introduction, kick things off with, “What do you do?”)
Unwittingly, then, we reinforce in our children the very same outlook that we, in fact, may abhor. (Rare is the adult who does not wish to see change in his world or the world at-large, who does not want ‘better’ for his or her child.) The Bible knows it as “the sins of the father,” that habit of passing down the very same iniquities and all-around craziness from which we supposedly wish to escape.
As a child and as an adult, I have witnessed children with the souls of an artist persistently dragged out into the world to be and to do and to act. “Why can’t you be more like your sister/brother?” demand the parents, who – like their parents before them – idolize the ‘movers and shakers.’
I suspect it’s why the likes of Jesus and other mystics urge us – the adults – to “be ye again as children,” because it’s only in the virginal, untilled landscape of a child’s mind that all the world is fresh and new and an entirely new outcome still possible.
