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Today's
Meditation:
It's
quite ironic-- and quite a shame-- that we do so much to
limit our young people. We tend to try to put them
into boxes, to get them to adopt our beliefs and our ways
of doing things, instead of encouraging them to reach out
and take risks, expand their horizons, and develop new and
hopefully better ways of doing things. Our young
people, though, need to be able to look at what we've done
and recognize the errors and the successes, and avoid the
former and expand the latter.
Our young people do have more daring than the older people
who surround them. Part of that, of course, comes
from not having faced many of the challenges and much of
the adversity that the older people have faced, but why do
we try to tell them not to take risks to avoid hurting
themselves instead of telling them that those risks may be
the most important elements of their lives? We
should encourage their ability to try new things instead
of discouraging them and turning them into frightened
beings who seek only security.
We've done what we can so far, and we'll do what we can
until we leave. But it's our young people who have
the potential to make more significant changes, if only
because they have more time to work on them once they
start. We can help them and we can encourage them--
and we can emulate them if we really want to shed
the chains that we've burdened ourselves with since our
early years. Youth is a time of amazing potential,
and we can tap into it if we allow ourselves to
uncover the youth that we've spent so many years covering
up in layer after layer of "security."
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