Have you ever wondered how much magic is hidden in our forgotten childhood experiences, locked somewhere at the back of our memory. Often we are amazed at the way a certain smell or taste takes us decades back, to a time of carefree play and innocence, when everything felt right and fair and beautiful.
Mind you I’m not talking from the lofty position of someone who has never known sadness and loss as a child. I’ve had a difficult and lonely childhood and an even harder adolescence affected by a severe psychological trauma and a weight problem, that I’ve developed as a result, but still there were also good times and often I’ve felt travelling back to those happy times by a story, a smell, a taste or a sound. One doesn’t need a time machine to travel through time. All one needs is one’s senses that are the gate keepers of this magnificent treasury of childhood memories and feelings.
Why are we unable to recall every happy moment of our childhood? The reason is not as obvious as one may think. It’s not like any old memory we’d rather forget. It is the deep feeling of loss our true self has, because we have buried it, the deep fear of our current adult self that it will eventually realize this rejection of the true self, of the little child world builder he once was, of the divine spark he came to this world with and rejected to adopt the values of an inhumane cruel system, centered around material wealth one can only acquire by exchanging his soul’s deepest desires for beauty, unconditional love and glorious awe before life’s true greatness and wonder, that prevent us from remembering.
That is the main reason why we must be extra observant and mindful of our own children’s deepest needs. We need to remain vigilant and not allow negativity and darkness enter the inner sanctum of the child’s soul. There is much garbage out there offered to children as food for their spirit, soul, mind and body.
I’m not some sort of fanatic vegetarian type. I think everything should be included in a developing child’s diet, but food must have a certain quality and not undermine the little person’s well being.
It is the same with the spirit and soul. The religious and general ideas we offer to the child have to be carefully examined before it is forced to embrace them. The pictures and art, the books and the music the child consumes need to be nourishing for his or her soul pleasing the senses and offering a sense of meaning. Remember the child hasn’t yet developed the walls an adult raises between him and the world and it is extremely vulnerable.
The answer to this is not to order the child to “toughen up”, to hit back and be hard to survive but rather to make our child truly strong enriching its life with beauty and pleasant emotions. He or she needs to have gathered such treasures of beauty that the ugliness of this world is not powerful enough to undermine or extinguish. The flame must remain lit so we must demand of creators to produce valuable and constructively beautiful work for the young.
Personally I think that, when something is unsuitable for or harmful to a child it is equally harmful to an adult. It’s not enough to search for beauty. We must demand it from the creators and accept nothing less by boycotting ugliness and supporting beauty in films, books and media in general.
The works that need to be produced for us must be both aesthetically pleasing and deeply meaningful. We may not have claimed such quality for ourselves, while we were young, but we damn well owe it to our children and should not just accept everything the system advertises and promotes, in order to condition us to be unsensitized to ugliness, cruelty and injustice, that seems to prevail in this world of ours.
Remember the child’s current experiences are what he or she will nostalgically recollect and draw strength from, when he/she is older. So now is the time to give it beauty by the truckload, so that he has the ability that we as children didn’t have to remain innocent, free and fullfiled.
Thank you for your patience.
Daphne Yakinthou 