As parents we wonder how best to raise our children. Understandably, we use the very same blueprint we’ve used for our own lives, encouraging our kids to pursue love, meaning, success, money, security, career, etc.
And yet, the lives built by those blueprints are rarely if ever happy ones (certainly not permanently so), are far from fulfilling or meaningful, are often shattered by discord and divorce, saddled in poverty or corrupted by materialism, crushed by loss and dependent on distraction.
To be sure, we have our moments, where life is joyful and passionate, where everything feels complete and good. But such moments, as we all know, are just that, momentary, and no sooner is the itch scratched than a new one emerges.
The truth (for those willing to be honest with themselves) is that none of us are particularly happy or at peace, and fewer still are able to embrace life on its own terms (i.e. in health or in sickness, alone or in a crowd, rich or poor).
Instead, we teach our kids that life is a kind of combat sport, something to manage and manipulate and to guard against (we are mortal, after all), where we must compete with other planetary denizens to eke out a life and a living (cooperation is reserved only for those we love or care about), where relationships too easily alternate between love and hate, where we must make war to secure peace, and so on.
It is this tattered and idiotic blueprint we bequeath our children who, upon dawning recognition of its receipt, understandably become as anxious and fearful and depressed as their parents and their parents before them. This also happens to coincide with an age when our kids start to see through the adult world’s b.s., when they ask: This is what you have to offer?
Where, in your fickle and fragile and often broken relationships our children ask, is the lasting intimacy and human connection you wish for me? How, precisely, is a lifetime of toil to deliver meaning and purpose when you yourself so often seem lost and listless and in search of something new? How will an accumulation of money and things make me happy when so many of the world’s most fortunate seem the least happy or fulfilled?
Yet with nothing else to guide them, our kids journey into adulthood with that same blueprint and eventually hand it off to the next generation and so on and so forth. Sins of the fathers.
Is there an answer?
Maybe by practicing a little humility and admitting to our children that we don’t have a clue as to what is going on; don’t know a thing about who or what we are or what this thing called life or existence or the universe is. And admitting that that generational blueprint is built not on wisdom, but ignorance and fear.
Maybe by not simply telling our kids we love them, but acknowledging we don’t actually know what ‘love’ is or, for that matter, what any other mind-made, inherited concept or belief is. And by extension, to encourage our kids to question everything for themselves and find their own truth.
Or as David Carse so brilliantly puts it, to consider what the mass (and history) of humanity has been teaching in order to “coax you along from cradle to grave. Whether you join the revolution or the Republican Party or Harley Owners Group or the Catholic Church or the Islamic Jihad or a Zen monastery or NOW or AA or the AAA or the devotees of Sri Ram or the local soccer team or Weight Watchers or the hospice volunteers or Weight Watchers or the hospice volunteers or Greenpeace or the Marines, they’re all the same. They will all encourage you to do what they do and think the way they think, and you’d like to believe them but on some level you know they’re all full of shit.”
Maybe by acknowledging unpleasant truths about ourselves and our lives. You loathe Donald Trump or Barack Obama? WHO or WHAT loathes these men? Don’t you think that until you can answer that question you should stop worrying about what others are doing or saying or thinking? And how do you know they’re not here to teach you something? How do you, who appears to have emerged out of nothing, know there isn’t a real blueprint at work and being overlooked by your feverish, arrogant mind?
Maybe by recognizing and celebrating the miracle of existence itself. We didn’t have to be, but we are, and that in itself is staggering. Extend that wonder to the food that becomes a part of you, the spinning planet to which you and I are pinned by unseen forces, and the invisible architect who goes by the initials DNA and is busy building us up and breaking us down in a vast, unimaginably intelligent interplay with the universe.
And maybe by embracing some very obvious truths that your own mind can recognize or, in some cases, modern science has now proved. For starters, that there is no separation between you and I and the dandelions growing in your yard and the clouds scudding across the sky and, yes, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. You don’t need to teach a child sportsmanship or empathy if he’s already been encouraged to recognized Oneness.
Carse dedicates an entire chapter of his book to ‘Don’t Know.’ Maybe that’s where we start with our kids, by admitting we really don’t know. Better still, maybe we start that particular lesson plan with ourselves. After all, kids are like sponges. They’ll pick it up if we bother to practice it.
