There is a small white flower in my garden blooming at 4 in the evening and hence called the 4 o’ clock flower. Many evenings of my childhood, I had spend looking at the flower to see the blooming. I tried everything from not closing my eyes to shielding the flower from the breeze, but I couldn’t see what I wanted.
So I formed a postulate that it is a secret known only to the flower. As the flower knows that I am looking at it, the breeze is helping it make small movements and bloom.
Nature has always fascinated me, and the stars were my favourite subject. My father told me that the stars were uncountable. I thought if I could count them, I would become a scientist. That was the age when I didn’t even know to count to more than 100. Yes! Counting the stars was stupid. But I enjoyed it.
I thought the moon belonged to me. Wherever I went, it followed me. And someday when the moon wasn’t there, I thought that it had slept early. My mother used to feed my younger sister saying that she would catch the moon for her. I would get angry, thinking how unfair it was to give my moon to her.
Another postulate of mine was that there were peoples and things trapped inside the TV. My sister and I planned a plot to break the TV when there was a lot of chocolates beamed on the screen. We even kept a hammer ready. Thank God, I didn’t do that.
I wonder what the children of the younger generation must be thinking in this age of technology. I have a friend who talks to her sister’s daughters through video call. Are these children thinking that their aunt is stuck inside the phone? Hope they are not planning to break the phone.
My childhood was filled with sea, breeze, stars, plants and flowers. The first 1,000 days are the foundation of the development of a child’s emotional, cognitive and motor skills. Home is their first school and parents are their first teachers. What you show them are what they become.
Make sure that your children know the beauty of nature. Teach them how to plant a tree. Let them play in the mud. Let them run. Let them fall. Let them get up by their own. Let them wipe off the dust and run again. And that is how children learn their first lesson of not giving up.
akhilvmoorthy@gmail.com
