Watching Children Play
A Small Pleasure
We toil and tumble in lockdown, housed within our own selves. A comfortable home provides no shelter from the troubles of our mind, and the reality of our own “heart-pumping, breath-gasping, decaying carcass¹” that we are housed in. The magic of life is strayed: have we always been like this? Does our sense of wonder radiate from us no more? Is that perhaps the reason why we feel inexplicably sad, for the most part?
To our luck, the magic and wonder surely shines still in our children. Those beautiful sprinkles of stardust are a reason to be thankful every day that we are humans — bathing in simple pleasures every second of every day.
We Gaze onto the Stars
Indifferent to being housed in quarantine or in a decaying carcass, we are beings faced with a haunting duality of which there is no escape. On one hand we are the embodiment of a decaying body that is nothing but a “worm and food for worms²”. On the other hand, we are a majestic collection of conscious cells, billions of them, that work together in miraculous and inexplicable ways.
It is for this duality that we can label ourselves as sensitive creatures that childishly gaze onto the stars; contemplating the universe in its measurements of millennia gone and infinite years to come. We, unlike any other “worm”, are capable of introspecting our own existence. We, unlike any other “carcass”, embody a remarkable yet cursed being that spans its entire lifetime navigating through the beauty and terror of living.
Children Know how to Party
It is for this confusing realization that I found solace in the strangest of places: my nephew’s birthday party. He turned seven.
He and his little brother of four are both navigating their own struggle enshrined in their awkward coming of age. Yet they are completely impermeable to the monsters that keep their parents up at night: ghosts lurking in the duality of past and future, life and death, pain and pleasure, good and evil.
For these dancing children couldn’t give up a passing second to these futile questions that paralyze the rest of us. They are too busy in awe of a floating balloon, the dancing flames atop a birthday cake, and now, with the aid of technology, the gazing eyes of their childhood friends conjured up on a computer screen.
Everything in a child’s world seems to make sense, even as they whine and moan and cry for this and that, or that and this.
Children Have Peace
As I absent-mindedly sang “happy birthday” during these testing times, it dawned on me that being around children has an intoxicating effect. Children seem to be completely at peace with the world in all its drudgery and betrayals. Singing and dancing through a path paved with jasmine gardens that smell of eternal heaven. The rest of us stand on the sidelines, dodging the thorns and lifting our phones in a futile effort to capture moments of a party that we seem to consistently miss.
They Open and Love the Present
The intoxication comes merely from watching them be: completely consumed by the present moment, devouring and discovering life as and when it comes.
Yes they cry and moan and complain just like we do, but they exist in a beautiful state oblivious to an unknown future or a painful past.
In wonderment of the moment present, my nephew opens and loves his present. He is so intoxicated by the pleasure of the moment that he can almost fly. It comes to be that these self-absorbed little angels have a lot to teach the rest of us — all we have to do is look!
I watch as the little one rejoices, and remind myself that we too are capable of living and loving, not just surviving. Alas, we defer this moment of joy by telling ourselves that we too can experience it, but must heroically dilute it with concerns about conquering this and that, or that and this.
They Master the Game of Life
The duality of life does not make sense and it will never make sense — It just is “this and that”. As a coping mechanism, we learn to shield ourselves from the obsessive contemplation of our futile existence by thrusting ourselves onto life itself: working, creating, playing, living. This seems to be the one remedy that we intuitively adopt as a comeback to life’s hard questions. It is not a bad remedy at all, in fact, it is exactly what life prescribed.
It is only when we play the game of life do we appear to be most at peace, just like a lion that hunts to live, we feel more secure by “telling ourselves that God is on our side than a gazelle³”.
We play life the only way we know how to: as children playing a game in all seriousness, completely enclaved by the moment in what it presents and represents. Sadly, we often shortchange ourselves as we cannot help but bring on some lame seriousness to the game — bogging down the entire “thingness” of it and leaving with a dull has been of fun simply forgotten.
They Are Little Angels
Alan Watts elegantly points out that children are called little angels because they appear to be so light that they can almost fly⁴. Alas, these children of the gods are then transitioned from being lulled to being dulled by the very ones that raise them. They unwillingly and unfairly become exposed to the manufactured dogma that life cannot just be childish interludes of serious play. No longer are they allowed to embody a series of uninterrupted episodes of ecstasy with all its beauty and wonderment.
The caretakers of these unassuming children go on preaching and teaching while these very custodians are without a clue: they go on lecturing that suffering, as they perceive it, is “just the way it is”. They continue philosophizing — no longer capable of enduring a party where someone else appears to be having more fun than they are.
They Show Us a Better Way
These little angels may relate to this dogmatic preaching — they too are suffering, albeit in a captivating playful way we just can’t articulate. We sooner or later realize that our children bring counterintuitive wisdom that we can extract by mindfully observing them at play. It is a small pleasure that is set to remind us that the adult in us tends to ruin his or her party by painstakingly taking seriously “what the gods made for fun⁵”.
References
¹ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973
² IBID.
³ IBID.
⁴ Alan Watts, Become What You Are, 2003
⁵ IBID.
