Learning from Childhood

When I watch world news, I am often left speechless. There appears to be so much trouble and conflict in the world. People fighting, people being killed. People seeking a better life, people crushed by their oppressive leaders. People facing natural disasters, people polluting the world and increasing global warming. We're all familiar with the stories that are reported everyday in our homes, on our mobile phones, and on the Internet.

I wonder about the state of the world. How things have changed since I was younger and everything was so simple. I was idealistic then, believing that there could be world peace. Believing that somehow there was a solution to every problem in the world. But, now, I really don't know any more whether the adult world was as great as I thought it would be. I ask myself, where are the choices and freedom I thought I would have. Where is the liberty to do what I put my mind to do? Has all this been a false idea that I adopted on seeing how adults appeared to get their own way and, who ultimately, wanted to be right even when they were not.

However, it's a fact that children are the ones who suffer the consequences of our adult actions when there are conflicts, wars and other crisis. We involve children in our matters even if they have not chosen to take part. We involve children in issues that they don't understand or are explained. We involve children because we assume that their opinions do not matter. We forget that we were children once ourselves. I don't know why I chose to look at the global situation with a focus on children.

It could be because that, during one of my meditations, I was taken back to a dream I had as a child. That of a world where it didn't matter who you were and how you looked, you were part of something bigger. In harmony with nature that we're now losing. And, while this vision was idealistic and somewhat naive, I do wish thad the walls that separate us between one and another are broken down. However, these walls don't exist in the real world but in our mind which means that we must be the ones to bring them down. To quote Gandhi: "We must be the change we want to see in the world".