We Need To Understand The Child Within All Of Us
What drives us apart, can bring us closer
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We often live our lives making assumptions about a lot of things that happen around us, and perhaps, we make the most of those assumptions about the people we come across, throughout our lives.
We assume that adulthood magically bestows people with all the sense they were deprived of as a child.
We think that growing with age naturally guarantees us with the ability to make rational choices, act in a rational manner, and generally approach life with a sense that we were incapable of, when we were younger.
If this was the truth though, we wouldn’t have had so many people out there (including ourselves), doing the exact opposite of those things.
And nobody wants to be all of that by choice; nobody wants to be purposefully irrational, or insensible.
The truth is rather simple than we’d like to pause, and consider;
The process of emotional growth and maturity, does not parallel to the process of physical growth and maturity.
We all need to rise up to this truth, and accept it with an open mind, and an open heart.
We need to understand, that there exists a child within all of us; a child that is still growing, and will perhaps continue to grow, for as long as we live.
We need to realize and acknowledge, that everyone we are in the process of knowing, is in a process of knowing themselves.
Author T.D. Jakes expressed this beautifully, through a statement quoted below:
“We have the tendency to want the other person to be a finished product while we give ourselves the grace to evolve.”
We often allow ourselves to heal, time and again. We also need to let everyone around us heal, time and again.
We are all works-in-progress, and that is what we need to understand, of ourselves, and others alike.
And once we are willing to understand and see through the simplicity in that truth, we will only learn to treat each other with kindness.
For that’s how we grow the child within each of us.
We are so careful when we deal with a child. We are kind, patient, and calm, simply because we understand;
A child is not capable of expressing effectively at all times;
Or, the child is naïve;
Perhaps, the child lacks the perception needed to understand something;
But most importantly, we understand that a child is still growing.
We understand that the child is still not equipped with the awareness and knowledge of many things in life.
We understand that we must be kind, patient and calm, with a child, because responding in such a way, is healthy (and essential) for the child’s growth.
Perhaps we need to treat each other with the same kindness and patience, with which we treat a child.
After all, even as we grow up, we often forget that a child within us is still growing, and that child still needs nurturing.
However, there’s one difference;
It was the responsibility of our parents (or guardians) to nurture the child we were in our childhood, while it is our responsibility to nurture the child that exists within us today, and to continue to nurture that child as it grows along with us.
Life presents us with many opportunities to be driven apart from each other;
It is in those moments that we need to find the courage to let the child within us, respond to the child in those around us.
In life, none of us has it together, but together, we can have it, one act of understanding at a time.
As we take responsibility for growing the child within ourselves, the least we could do is be kind to the people around us, while they are in the process of growing the child within themselves.
And if they are not yet sure of how to go about it, maybe we can show them how.
That’s how, one understanding at a time, we grow ourselves and those around us.
