THE STARS ON EARTH: OUR INNER CHILDREN

These tiny creatures, perhaps have a whole world in their eyes. We were all once little children, with little hands and feet. Playing around, searching for life, running toward anything that sparked our curiosity. Being reckless, being little explorers and champs, beings with minds that felt life to our bones, big eyes blinking. Laughing and crying with no care in the world. Why? Because our hearts felt and our eyes expressed. We were children, and we did not know how to hide and conceal….What happened then?

Why did we conceal the beats of our beating heart? Why did our ears restrict us from hearing out the giggles and wiggles of our tiny selves? What happened?

Let us all take a trip down memory lane and fall in love with ourselves a little bit more…

Our childhood. What was that like? 

Yes, perhaps it has been framed into many photographic memories for different people, and yes, the remembrance of our little selves exists in the words of the elder. But, do you remember who you were?

What were our quirks like? What did those little shining eyes see? What magnanimous beings did that little mind create? What stories did we make with our tiny selves? 

What was our imagination like? Why did we fall in love so effortlessly with colours? Our pookie teddy bears had their names and lives along with us. Where are our teddies now?

We saw the vast blue sky in its greatness and looked up and every other big person, a giant human being. Sitting on our father’s shoulders, we felt like the greatest cutie on the planet and yet, the butterflies in our tummy made us laugh so hard that our drools fell on dad’s bald head like raindrops. What happened to us? Who are we now?

Our eyes saw the big green trees with their brown branches stretching out like claws , and we must have stood in front of them and felt so little. The tree looked down on us like our great grandmother from 300 years ago, looking down with eyes somewhere, whispering tales of her immortality and age. 

The sand and the mud were our best friends. Each day we drew our scenes onto it and played on it, splashing mud on ourselves and our friends. Football was the code to being a part of the social circle, to friendships and enemies. Football decided who was the winner of the day. Football became the emotion of our childhood.

Water made our gloomy faces happy and our dry clothes wet. Splashing through puddles and swimming in ponds, going against the warnings of our mother to not dirty the washed t-shirt and spilling ketchup all over while devouring our favourite pasta. Playing in between our study periods because homework made us bored. Looking outside the window and watching the rays of the sunset fall on our faces, letting ourselves get lost in the warmth of it and feeling the light casting on our face. That was childhood.

Flowing to the tunes of music, reaching every vibration of every beat, feeling our hands slowly take shape to the tunes coming at us and there! We danced. Danced to express the joy flowing through our blood, danced to celebrate the tummy rumbling, earth shackling giggling joy filling our lungs with air, we danced. We danced however we could, however we wanted to do, however the tunes spoke to us. Who, then, told us to change it all? Who demanded that we move only one way? What made us bend?

The delicious aroma of our favourite meals, of mom’s cooked shakshouka and grandma’s home made mango pickles gracing the table. Of meat biriyanis and fish fries and the deliciousness that followed. When our eyes saw the table and yearned to taste each of the delicacies earnestly wanting to satisfy our grumbling bellies and our hearts. When we gladly immersed to the ice cream treats and freebies…who shamed us for asking too much? Who made us rethink before every bite of food we intake? What made us overthink of our meals and who stopped us from taking delight from our favourite foods? Who did that? What did that? Why do we think before we eat?

When there was a time, one day, where we were not spoken of our gender, when we listened to doing anything, anything that caught our eyes. Football, dancing, drawing, wearing blue and pink clothes, feeling ourselves, feeling beautiful in it…….Who said that we shouldn’t do it? Who told us to be something else to be accepted? Who called us girly for loving to dance and too manly for loving to play sports? What began dictating our choices? Our choices that reflected our true-ness, who did it? 

When anger and sorrow splurged in our mighty hearts and we were not bound by the constructs of masking and pretention, our little selves cried and expressed. Perhaps some of us got hurt for it and some of us were lucky to be held with warm embraces, yet we expressed. We screamed, we cried, we fussed, we felt. We felt every ounce of our emotion oozing out through our eyes. Who shunned us down? Who called us weak for expressing? Why did we turn ourselves into rocks, somewhere still begging to be seen yet hiding because the world outside is very scary? Who made us scared of it all? What made us stumble and who laughed? And why did we listen?

Why don’t we honour our younger selves? Why have we been taught to look at our little selves with criticism? Criticisms that bore thorny weights of magnanimous societal constructs on tiny little people who were creating meanings with their self-expressions. We were little too with our mighty hearts, so shouldn’t we give our inner children some love too? Shouldn’t we honour the eyes of our inner child?