Sunday, September 9, 2007

Children Fairies

A child should never - under any conditions - be subjected to deliberate pain.

Pain is inevitable. Every child will bruise their legs or cut their hands while playing. When I was a little boy I have probably fallen over 17 trillion times while playing in the garden or with friends or something. Every wound has healed over the years with very few leaving scars that remind me now of great times. But deliberate pain never heals - even when its scars do. And it does not hold good memories at all.

By their nature, children are innocent and pure. They may be mischievous, but are not evil. They may be annoying, but are not bad. They are just taking their time to explore the vast world they are brought in at their own rate and their own way.

This is their nature, this is the way they are. That is the beauty of a child.

Now think of a child as a fairy. Imagine that every single little boy and girl are all fairies with beautiful fragile golden wings. Their wings take them places. They see things and learn things and evolve in their own ways. They are not held down by gravity like grown-ups. They have wings to take them further up.

The wings take them places grown-ups don't even understand. After all, how can one understand what they do not know is there?

And the little children keep flying higher and higher. There is no limit to where they can go. They never get tired. The more their wings flap., the more their imagination fuels them on. The higher they fly, the more they see and learn...and the more grown-ups will not understand them.

But then, humans are not known for dealing well with things they don't understand. Our history speaks of it. We destroy what we don't' understand with no remorse.

Failing to understand the children, some parents think their kids are 'bad' or 'undisciplined'. To solve the problem, parents can go to insane extremes. The truth of the matter, they just don't understand their kids. Discipline was never meant to hold people back. Children are not meant to be disciplined 24 hours a day. If they did, they would never fly too far up - they would never know their true potential.

To enforce discipline, some parents resort to pain. They beat their children up to 'force some discipline into them'. The problem is that the children's little fairy wings are very very fragile. Slowly they tear and break.

Pretty soon, the children are trying to fly up into their own world but their wings just can't carry them anymore. They flap as hard as they can, but they just don't rise from the ground. They are becoming more and more like adults. There is one major problem though. Most adults manage to bring things back from their flights during their childhoods. But these children never got the chance to bring anything back. They grow up never knowing how to fly.

As their wings stop flapping, their imagination starts to fail. Slowly, their light starts to wane till it finally dies away.

A child should never - under any conditions - be subjected to deliberate pain. Period.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Perspectives

Reality is the most over-rated illusion there ever was.

I don't know what people mean when they say something "is real." It always bugged me. How do you define 'real'? Is it something you see and hear and feel? But the senses are different from one person to the other. Is it something who's nature people can agree about? There never was something that everyone could agree about. So what is 'real'?

The truth is I don't believe in reality. It does not exist. Reality to each of us is how each of us conceives the world around them. In essence, when we speak of reality we are actually talking about perspectives. I believe in perspectives, we each have our own different perspectives on things.

Take for example food. To my reality, eggs taste better than anything else. To one of the closest people in the world to me, eggs smell and taste worse than most things in the world. That is a difference of perspectives. A difference of how we both relate to the egg. We both have our different sets of reality.

This extends to how we relate to our environments as well. I see rain and it makes me happy, I run down the stairs and take a walk in the rain and enjoy getting wet. I enjoy the twinkling drops of water left on leaves and the washed look of the streets. To another person, the rain is a source of gloom. It forced them to cancel a beautiful picnic out in the park in the beautiful afternoon sun.

I loved the rain. They hated the rain. But the rain is not different, it's our perspectives that are.