On Children

This week, we welcomed a new granddaughter, Arlo Jeanne Poster, into our family. Baby and mom are healthy. We are thrilled! 

As I held Arlo in my arms, she stretched, yawned, and gazed back at me with unfocused eyes. The future belongs to this helpless new being. That gives me hope! Perhaps she arrived just in time. 

The Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran hints at the responsibilities, challenges, and mysteries of nurturing a new life in beautiful lyrical prose. I offer his words with commentary:

On Children, by Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.

   They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

   They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you

they belong not to you.

“Life’s longing for itself.” We rarely think of it in those terms. George Harrison made the same point, “life goes on within you and without you.” Life isn’t about us. Children punctuate that truth. 

You may give them your love

but not your thoughts,

   For they have their own thoughts.

Children value our love more than our opinion. That’s easy to forget. We never have as much control over them as we may think. 

   You may house their bodies

but not their souls,

   For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit,

not even in your dreams.

I’m mystified by the unimaginable advances Arlo will witness in her lifetime. My Grandmother never held a smartphone. Our modern times will appear similarly quaint to Arlo.

It’s natural to have expectations for children. On this, Gibran provides wise counsel:

   You may strive to be like them,

but seek not to make them like you.

   For life goes not backward

nor tarries with yesterday.

Gibran brings On Children to a close with the best description of parenthood I’ve ever read:

   You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

   The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 

and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

   Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

  For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

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It’s rare to find so many beautiful truths packed into such an economy of space:

-Life is sufficient onto itself. 

-We may love but not possess another person. 

-Today’s certainties will yield to an unimaginable future. 

-Give wings to the thoughts and aspirations of youth. 

-Find gladness in difficulty

-Hold fast to your truths.

I’ve read On Children many times over the past fifty years. Each time, the words glow with new patina. 

Especially now! 

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