For each child there are very special, long-remembered events: being
taught to swim by one's father, family picnics, trips into the world
beyond city or country, going to the circus, a world's fair, a zoo or a
fantasy land. There, also are the events of being loved and loving
deeply, linked somehow with times of feeling unloved and unloving.
More than earlier, today there are multiple community groups for
children where activities are guided and supervised. Within these
situations and in the free play of neighborhood children, there is
always the confusing, enlightening, and frequently distorted information
gained through discovering your relationship with both boys and girls.
Exploration by children into their sexual similarities and differences,
a healthy pursuit, in the past more than today often aroused parental
furor. Furor and different reactions from different involved parents
lead to further child confusion and focus.
Within childhood peer relations there are games, play, and schoolwork
that allow the child to come to know personally the meanings and
feelings of competing, collaborating, fighting, winning, losing,
destroying, building, aggression, passivity, constriction, freedom, and
choice.
Then there is adolescence with all its moodiness, questions, fears, and
experimenting related to adult modes of being. The moods are a mystery
and the questions often unanswerable or the answers contradictory.
Norman Kiell in _The Universal Experience of Adolescence_ says that as
adults we forget the intensity, turmoil, and concretes of this period
and that perhaps we have to.[7] Yet, it is not possible that the
instability and discomfort of spirit lived in adolescence does not leave
its ingrained tracing as part of our eternal presents.
When the focus of our responsibility shifts from play to work, during
these early years of becoming, depends on our particular circumstances
and abilities. For most persons there is a tipping of the balance
between these. Hopefully neither extreme is the master. Fortunately, in
many instances, as the child's work as been to play; the adult's work
world, his world of responsibility is lived, experienced by him, to an
extent as play--it gives satisfaction and pleasure.
{44}
Some adults select another and are chosen by this other for a sharing of
their worlds. Some go it alone. Some procreate new beings; some create
in other ways; some give-take and exist; some just lean. These last
appear to be, and yet to not be, "all-at-once."
MAN BECOMES EVER MORE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account