Utku Kaynar
Nine: Being a Child
Photo by Eduard Pretsi on Unsplash.
Friday, August 16, 2019 / San Jose, California
Ada,
Today you turned ten months old. Witnessing your development and watching a human being grow, step by step, day by day, is an incredible feeling. At this rate, before we even notice the time passing, you will leave babyhood behind and become a child.
Partly for that reason, and partly because it is time for this subject in the course of these letters, today we will talk about being a child.
I hope that when you first read this letter, you are still a child and wondering what there could be to discuss about being one. We are children, after all—what more is there to it?
Like all good things in life, the value of being a child may only become clear with time. What I am saying now will sound unfamiliar to you, but our childhood can be a home, a kind of homeland, where we take refuge again and again throughout our lives.
We recover more easily from the troubles we face as adults, but we carry the marks of an unsettled, unhappy childhood for a lifetime.
The reverse is also true: according to research, children who are happy and at peace, who receive love and affection, grow into more peaceful and balanced people.
Your mother and I are doing everything we can to give you that happy story, and we will keep doing so every day. Your childhood, and your ability to protect the child inside you even as an adult, are too precious to leave to chance any more than we have to.
This is not something unique to us; all parents who love their children act this way. Sadly, not every child is this fortunate. For some children, this love and affection are a luxury.
The documentary The Beginning of Life, available on Netflix, explained that people never learn as many skills at any other time in their lives as they do in their first three years. Think about it: when you are born, you have never seen another human being. By the time you are three, you can walk, talk, play games, navigate a social hierarchy, and draw on an extraordinarily vast store of knowledge.
Extraordinary creativity, curiosity, a passion for living and learning, pure, unadulterated joy, sadness, a fearlessness about trying, and perhaps a reckless willingness to take risks.
The utterly astonishing magic of discovering life. Cherish it, my daughter.
Cherish it, because things may not always go so well: these people who learn so quickly often grow into adults who have lost their creativity and curiosity and become trapped in fixed patterns.
Why is that?
Ada, in most cases, as we grow up, our minds adapt to the culture and the world around us, and we try to fit into our social circumstances in ways that suit our nature. Human beings are social animals, after all, and acceptance within the herd takes precedence over our individual passions. Adapting to a culture also means gradually accepting the values and assumptions of the society around you and following them without question. So we pick up this whole set of behaviors and norms as little habits and come to feel comfortable within them. That comfort zone keeps you from seeing things differently, from looking through different windows. In time, you become unable to see anything beyond the frame you have squeezed yourself into.
And yet, as Picasso said, every child is an artist. The problem is remaining an artist when we grow up.
That is why it matters that you live your childhood to the fullest and, more importantly, that you carry your creativity, curiosity, joy, and enthusiasm with you throughout your life like a compass. Of course you will adapt to your surroundings, but you must not lose your ability to look at things from different perspectives.
If you want to change something in your life or in the world around you, the answers you seek will not come from the established order around you.
I am ending this letter with a commercial that sums up what I have been telling you very well.
Enjoy your childhood to the fullest. More than that, hold your childlike spirit close and take it with you into adulthood, my daughter. If one day, for one reason or another, your adult self feels like a stranger to you, embrace the child inside you. That child will tell you what it means to be human.
With love,
Dad.
P.S. The final italicized sentence is from Sezen Aksu. See Masum Değiliz.