To free our world from ourselves,
From the chaos and destruction we create,
We must first learn to create free individuals.
To bring about peace on earth,
We must inspire a harmonised society.
For love to fill up our world,
We must first come to know what love really is,
Then learn it, practise it, and teach it.
Our key to change is children.
Children are born as love,
We just need to learn to let them remain as such.
It is the adults who cage us,
Reluctant to change as they are,
They keep us repeating stories of old,
Those they inherited from their elders.
But the world needs us to stop teaching,
And start learning alongside our children.
The world is a different place now,
To the one we were born to,
Our stories are redundant.
We cannot look to the past for our answers,
But we might look there for the mistakes,
Toward what we wish to avoid.
We might look back to better reflect,
And determine a more righteous way of moving forward.
Our parents were likely wrong about much,
but only because they pretended to be right.
Can we let ourselves be wrong?
There is a great courage to be found in unknowing,
In admitting to oneself that their own thoughts,
Might not be of as much value as once assumed.
And in unknowing, you might just open a door,
To learning and knowing things of more value and worth,
You might just start thinking more.
Thinking is an active process,
One informed by the information in your head.
Conflicting information creates conflicting humans.
So what if we fill up our children,
With less-conflicting stories?
What if we teach them the facts,
And how to think about them,
And apply them to life?
We can know something,
But if we don’t know how to contextualise,
How to make sense of things in the right way,
Well, it can spell chaos.
Has not every war been fought,
Because two groups of people disagree?
This is child’s play,
An extension of the, I’m right, you’re wrong,
Of the primary school playground.
Big boys (sorry guys, but it’s mostly been you),
Playing toy soldiers for real, for what purpose,
Other than to prove a point that threatens an ego?
I’m sure it’s all more complex than that,
But the human patterns and programming present as rather simple,
And are certainly fairly predictable.
Humans are predictable, we think we’re not,
But at a deeper level of conscious, subconscious and unconscious thought,
We are very predictable indeed.
Just as addiction has predictable patterns,
Of both thought and behaviour,
So too does anger, anxiety,
And an overall sense of self-judgement.
If we don’t like ourselves, we will never like the world.
If we don’t learn to bring peace to the hearts of our children,
It is something they will never come to know.
So can we get set about teaching them the right things,
The things that will inform a different kind of life,
And contribute to creating a different kind of world?
Can we let our children become the change we all seek,
Can we let them become our gateway into a free and peaceful world,
Perhaps one that even loves one another?
They have to learn it to know it,
So can we simply stop teaching conflict and hate,
And start modelling compassion and understanding?
Can we teach them how to live well,
With an underlining acceptance of the other,
As well as themselves?
Can we show children how to love the world they were born to,
As well as show them how to enjoy the life they are here to live?
Can we let them know that they are a little miracle in existence,
And help them learn to celebrate and appreciate this gift we call life?
I hope so…
© Santuario, Ana Maria. Mirror, Mirror, Collection 1 (2024). Faith in Change Publishing, London.