Every child born into this world brings the message that God is not yet despaired of man.
~ Rabindranath Tagore ~here is no doubt that children are invaluable ornaments to any home. They are the incomparable gifts of God to parents. An instinctive bond develops between children and parents. A fellow who had never been there a year or so ago, a tiny tumbling creature exercises so much power on his father and mother that they find his influence irresistible. They have no other way but to carry out his wishes and commands to the last letter. It is natural that parents feel that their children are their whole and sole property - parts of their very being. They are under the conviction that they are totally theirs; they can mould them as they wish.
Ifwethinkabitdeeply,weeasilyseethatnothing/noone,inreality belongs to us for ever. We are born into this world with nothing and leave it carrying nothing. Whatever we think is ours, comes to us and leaves us in between. However hard it is to accept it, we have to realize that it is not different with our children. We have only to perform our duties towards them at the different stages of their growth and development.They are not our credit cards. Kahlil Gibran in his poem “Your Children” brings to us pertinent facts about our children. He says that our children are not our children. They are the products of life longing for life. They are, no doubt, born of us, but they do not belong to us. They are for a world that is going to be, which is different from ours. We can house their bodies, but not their souls. We should not expect them to change themselves according to our dreams and aspirations. We have to change ourselves to facilitate achievement of their goals and aims. They are not for us, we are for them ………….. Children are the world's most valuable
resource and its best hope for the future.Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and
daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet
they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Attachment b e c o m e s a clog or a painful chain on us only when it is extremely ego – centric. To the extent we work for larger schemes to bless a vaster section of humanity, to that extent the attachment loses its poison and comes to bless the age. Many poisons serve as medicines in their diluted form, while the same in a concentrated form can bring instantaneous death. The ego and ego – centric desires bind and destroy man, but to the extent he can lift his identifications to include and accommodate in it larger sections of the living world, to that extent attachment gathers an ethical halo, a divine glow and becomes a cure for subjective pains and imperfections.
~ Swami Chinmayananda