Growing Up - A Phenomena of Chastity and Sins

Childhood is a promise that is never kept. ~Ken Hill

It is funny, how often we retreat back to our childhood memories. Every step that we take to adulthood is haunted by the reminiscences of the past. Somehow, we do recuperate our interest in those colourful toys, those pictured story books, those old tattered soft toys and the best of all the moment capturing photos.

If I had a time-turner and I could travel back in time, I would love to re-live my childhood days. What can be more splendid and memorable than one’s own childhood! Those care-free days, the hastiness, being a liberated bird what more can a peson want? There is no one to yoke you with errands, no one to arbitrate your actions, clothes and tongue for that matter. You are exempted because you are a kid. Isn’t that amazing?

You can run around your house half naked and blemish your siblings’ apparel. You can jump on the bed and sofa and topple over your father’s stomach. You can make your mother sprint around you just to get you garbed. You can talk and play hysterically with your friends. You get the opportunity of choosing whatever you want because no one wants to see your innocent little face in tears. And still, if you don’t get what you want, you can yell out your lungs. You will get what you covet.

Yes, it is true that man is surrounded in the gummy cycle of money. Man holds no magnitude of his values learnt in his childhood. Every dive he makes, every memory he overlooks. The swift and hectic life, this rat racing for wealth has shook-off the joy of mankind. Becoming mere marionettes at the hands of our desires, we shed every clothes of our happiness. Being naked of our values, we run amuck in this crowded life. When you die, nobody ever buries you with money that you earned. It is the respect that you take to your grave. Money buys you no respect or love. Yet, can we still seek for that happiness that we consider the money can provide us?

It is said that the ‘simplest things are often truest’. What can be more simple and true like one’s own childhood? On the contrary, money complicates your life. The cardinal sin of greed and anger plays its role. It makes you more lusty and gluttonous for money. The more money you acquire, more prideful you become. Money strains your relations with your loved ones, which eventually brings you, sorrow and despair. It precincts you and limits your potentials. Money commits all the seven cardinal sins and drives you away from you cardinal virtues. You lose your humility, kindness, patience, diligence, charity, temperance and chaste virtues after being sinned by desirable money. Money acts like a lusty woman who drugs you till you become an addict. It drives out the pure, spiritual realm of childhood and condemns your purity. It is only after the childhood you grow up, you become an adult and you are sucked in by the complexities of the world.

It is true love cannot buy you a house. It can’t deliver the money to travel across the globe. It won’t buy you food for your family. It won’t cover your body to save you from the brute weather. Yet, it provides you something what wealth cannot. It brings you not a house but a home. With love, you can travel the journey of life. It provides you peace and content. It also provides you all the warmth you need.

Love in the purest form is experienced in your childhood. Your mother shouts at you for being sloppy, only because she loves you. Your father might have slapped you for even losing a single mark, it’s only because he wants the best out of you. Your siblings might have taken away what was yours, but that only teaches you forbearance. Your grandparents would take you in their arms and put you to sleep, rock you to bed and sing you a lullaby. Your mother won’t falter to run to you to catch you when you fall and kiss you sweetly while you cry. Your father won’t stop himself to buy you what you want and hug you tightly while you tremble. Under the umbrella of love and care your childhood is preserved.

The joy of childhood lies in the minuscule things. Observing a little pup by the road, having candy floss, ice popsicle, toffee given to you by your neighbours or even the one act play with your toys brings immense of joy. Collecting little flowers by the road and presenting it to your mother, making shabby greeting cards for your father during festivals, singing sweet song of innocence brings the most joyous moment to all. Little things hold greatest value; it means the world to you right then and there. Today, when you are all grown up, when you present brand new phone to your child he may lose it the next day and demand more. Today, you may want a new phone, then a new car, a new house…how restless is your demands, yet, you are unhappy. When the only one colour dominates your life, the colourful past begins to fade. The meaning of happiness, joy, love, and care is demeaned with money as a centre of attraction.

However, as a grown up, I, too, am fascinated to money as a means of life. It irks me to be pulled by my wishes on one side and my memories of the past. It’s a wish to replenish this void of my heart to be enriched with the joy of childhood memories. The sweet fruits are borne in the spring.

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

- Elizabeth Lawrence

However, the spring of my life, those youthful days have passed by. What lives now, are just the reminiscences. Life still can be led with an optimist view. We never disregard what is truly felt or touched. It is factual, money is a malady but the cure is the memories of the past that dwells and grows better like an old wine.