CHILDREN
Children are the beginning of life.
Let them stop coming and the world will be no more. From a garden, it will
become a wasteland. There will be neither noise, nor music. It will be a world
without the soul of creation.
So long as children are there, the
world continues to remain a world of beginning, middle and endless maturation. This world will certainly start dying, if the
arrival of new children is suspended by God.
Parents, in fact all adults, are
developed children. The major difference is that they are no longer as innocent
as they were in their childhood. While children remain close to God, adults
become distant.
The best adults in the world do not allow their innocence of heart, mind and
soul to decline and vanish.
The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) says in a song in
Gitanjali :
“On the seashore of endless worlds
children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water
is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts
and dances…. They build their houses with sand and they play with empty shells.
With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast
deep…..They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl fishers
dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles
and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how
to cast nets.”
Unfortunately, when children become grown up men and women -, they lose
a good deal of divine innocence
described by Rabindranath Tagore in his song.
The
English author Mary Howitt (1799-1888) said
: God made children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race---to
enlarge our hearts; and to make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and
affections; to give our souls higher aims; to call out all our faculties to
extended enterprise and exertion; and to bring round our firesides bright
faces, happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the great
Father, every day, that he has gladdened the earth with little children.”
Finally, these words of the American
author Richard Eugene Burton (Born March 14, 1861): Our first duty to children
is to make them happy.---If you have not made them so, you have wronged them.
No other good they get can make up for that. ******
G.R.Kanwal
7th November 2025
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