The difference between children and adults is huge. So what is it? Is it a level of consciousness that is different? A difference in our brains or maybe a difference in our souls? Adults are very pre-occupied with life but children seem to be much more free in their minds. Children are much more excited about life, have much more energy. They are not weighed down with the burden of life of the human condition. They see the world simlply from their simple, unburdened minds, free to look upon the world with fresh open eyes not through troubled, resigned eyes that adults look through.
I’m not talking about just the burden of paying the bills and having a mortgage, going to work and doing the shopping. And not the burden of having a family or other people to look after but the heavy weight of the struggles of life. The range of emotions and reactions that are in adults just doesn’t exist in children. Children can be angry and frustrated about situations before them but they don’t stew and get tangled about the horrors of their lives. They don’t live in deep despair about feelings and emotions. Sure they get upset and sad if things happen to them or things aren’t ‘right’ or as they should be, and so they should with the horror of the world around them, but in adults there is a relentless struggle. Deep in our beings adults seem to unhappy, burdened and troubled to the core.
Teenagers and adolescents also seem to carry the burden of life. They too do get depressed. Teenagers do stew and fog out in their brains, want to get off the planet and away from the world. What has happened? What are they thinking about, what are they worried about? Has their level of consciousness changed, do our brains change somehow from childhood into adolescence and then again into adulthood? Is that what is going on? But how does a change in the make-up of the brain change the amount of weight or depression that can be upon us?
When you are around children it can either be completely uplifting and fun and you can have some ‘time-out’ from your adult worries as you lose yourself in their imaginative, colourful world. But sometimes children can be hard work. They are too lovely, too innocent, too pure – that innocence is confronting of the lonely mean world that my adult brain lives in. I just want them to go away, to ‘shut-up’. I find children annoying when I feel like that and just want them to sit quietly and play alone – oh gosh, how horrible! The truth is, they are not changing or different, I am. My needs, what I want is different from day to day and I want them to be what I need. Poor children living in this adult world of confusion and horror. One day I hope the world will be THE place for children, a lovely colourful imaginative world where adults can be at one with the lovely innocence of their happy little souls.
Dianne enjoys writing, a natural lifestyle and occasionally answering the perplexing questions constantly proffered by her beautiful niece. She recently read an essay about consciousness which in part inspired this article.
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