upbringing free of fear
I will tell you one thing which may sound unpleasant, so please bear with me and by all means let me know your disagreement. We have been fed with fear all our life. We live on it. I have been told all my life that “water is a dangerous thing” and “there are snakes in the forest don’t go there” and “if you have forgotten to put a flower in front of Gods photo today something terrible will happen” and most frequent of all “if somebody asks where are you going when youre leaving, that’s terrible luck”… a never ending list of all kinds of things (some baseless, and some having some shred of common sense but overly exaggerated). We also strengthen our fears by building our own interpretations of any bad experiences we have.
Over the past week in Honnemaradu, I met many people whom I was very impressed with. People who don’t hesitate to just sleep on the floor of a forest without even a tent at night. People who just allow their 10 year old kids to go boating alone. One of the kids just walks around the house in the darkness in the home if he dosen’t get sleep. One of the ladies there whom I spoke to told me that she restrains herself from warning her kids as far as possible “no no NOOOO don’t do that my God its so dangerous!!”. I am not talking about villagers, but all upper middleclass people. And of course I could observe that these kids had extraordinary commonsense, never doing anything stupid and recklessly dangerous. Most importantly, these kids have on many occasions stayed without their parents for a couple of days, with some family friends, without crying for their parents. I did not feel that this independence at a young age was similar to the American version of independent kids. Unlike Americans, here the kids definitely had a lot of affection and regard for their parents.
[not that I’m complaining about the way I have been brought up 😉 Just an alternate possibility here]
Good observation, Sanjay. I have also wondered many times what makes a person brave or a coward. It is just what you are told in your childhood. In fact, even stories play a part in this. As of today, I have grown up with a tremendous fear of snakes, coz I used to be fascinated of snakes in my childhood and I read lots of stories and myths regarding snakes, and I developed a deep-rooted fear of them, because usually the snakes in the stories are vile, poisonous creatures. Well, you need to monitor your own words very carefully around a child, because without your knowledge you might be feeding the child’s fears. Its a difficult task, parenting.