The Most Precious Insights

'You yourself are the child you must learn to know, rear, and above all enlighten. To demand that others should provide you with textbook answers is like asking a strange woman to give birth to your baby. There are insights that can be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious. Seek in your child the undiscovered part of yourself.'
- Janusz Korczak (1878-1942, Polish-Jewish children´s writer and educator who is as well known in Europe as Anne Frank. Like her, he died in the Holocaust and left behind a diary; unlike her, he had a chance to escape that fate-a chance he chose not to take.)

I used to disagree when a mentor-friend said, we are two persons - the adult and the child. It's taken me years to now understand and fully agree with him. In many ways I am still the person I was 25 years ago. I still have the same longings, same fears, and same hurts. But in many ways that child has been supressed and buried - much by the self-imposed expectations of the adult. I want to be, do, think, speak in ways that isn't really me, just the image of a person I'd like to be - the 'false construct' so to speak.

The only way to real joy and authenticity is to find that child again, exhume him from the grave I've buried him alive in years ago. Go back, I must, to confront my fears. Find healing for the hurts. And pursue my longings and passions the I was made to. - YY