When was the last time you doodled a unicorn, a spaceship, or a heart?
Accept that, like me, you have also lost your childhood kindness. We spent our childhood in the fantasy world. We doodled unicorns, flew spaceships, and drew hearts in our notebooks. We used to play with color and dance in the rain, but we lost all this fun without realizing when we lost it. We grew up in a society oblivious to our transition from childhood to adulthood. We were kicked out of the fantasy and thrown into the real world. Alas, we became smarter at the cost of losing our imagination, kindness, and curiosity.
In our childhood, we lived in our imagination and rode unicorns in our fantasy world; we made friends because of kindness in friendship without bias or self-interest; we used to build spaceships to reach the moon to fulfill our curiosity of exploring the universe. We were born imaginative, kind, and curious but lost all those traits as we grew older. Why did this happen? It didn’t happen overnight. As we transitioned from childhood to adulthood, we were forced to change how we used to look at relationships, and our priorities in life changed; we stopped our imagination and scuffled our curiosity. We transformed our minds from living in fantasy to a fearful world, and during that transition, we replaced our endogenous kindness with aggression.
Being kind to becoming aggressive started when we first replaced our unicorns with warhorses; it happened when we began patronizing spaceships over missiles and started making hearts with the color of our national flags. As we transitioned from the fantasy world to the real world, we were taught how our ancestors slaughtered enemies while riding on a warhorse, and we were taught how our patriots pierced the hearts of traitors, and how our scientists made missiles that annihilated the cities of people whose army were supposed to attack us. We were forced to admire our ancestors who made our enemy’s hearts bleed red, and we learned how blessed we are to be born into a particular race carrying a specific nationality or skin color. We lost our kindness and trade-off our unicorn, spaceship, and heart with warhorse, missiles, and pierced heart of the enemy. Our historical ancestors planted their seed of vendettas and hate, which diluted the kindness we inherited since birth.
We are now filled with hubris, self-pride, and ego. Kindness is lost in our transition to adulthood. The damage has already been done to our generation, but what we can do now is to protect the next generation. Do not pass on the stories of hate and aggression inherited from earlier generations; instead, let the next generation live their lives with their endogenous kindness. Refrain from polluting the young generation with our old stories.
We lost our kindness and trade-off our unicorn, spaceship, and heart with warhorse, missiles, and pierced heart of the enemy.
Remember, kindness is not a scarcity; we have become oblivious to it. We only need to educate just one generation to bring back kindness. Do not alter young minds and feed the bias that we inherited.
Let our children live in a world of unicorns, spaceships, and hearts filled with love because that fantasy world is much kinder than the real world. And we should learn from that world how to be kind. Our children are the future, and you cannot build a future on the foundation of hate. Let the kindness prevail.
All we need is to educate just one generation to make this world kinder.
Author: Asif Durrani
Dated: 28 Jan 2024
https://www.linkedin.com/in/asifdurrani
Also published at Medium
Asif Durrani 