Children know how to be joyful regardless of circumstances

Children allow beauty to delight them

Children are teachable

Children are sincere seekers of truth

Today, 20 November, marks World Children's Day with the aim of raising awareness of the importance of caring for the wellbeing and protection of children around the world. How can marking this day help adults live their everyday lives more fully? What life lessons can we learn from children? 

They show that joy is not merely a surface sentiment, but a decision to live in freedom from the influence of any adversity. Joy is a state of the soul - but a pure, sincere, simple soul. Many adults lose their joy precisely because they have lost purity of heart. That is why we need contact with childlike joy, which defies every hardship. Children can teach us the ability to rejoice sincerely in life and in everything life brings. This is not some irrational utopia in which we would pretend to be blind to the difficulties we encounter, but rather an awareness that no misfortune in life has, in itself, the power to make us hopeless, unless we ourselves surrender to despair. 

They are genuinely fascinated by things that are new and unusual to them. They are healthily unburdened, they do not trouble themselves with foolishness, and they do not waste time on things in which they find nothing beautiful for themselves. They know how to be present in the moment, which allows them very well to notice the beauty of the world around them. They are guided by an intuitive awareness that beauty, or at least the potential for its development, is an essential component of a meaningful life. That is why they know how to approach every situation with a desire to discover beauty, and they know how to enrich every relationship with their capacity to delight in it.

They are aware that someone else knows something better than they do themselves. And yet they are very perceptive. Because of the purity of their own hearts, they are very good at recognising the quality of other people's intentions. That is why adults truly need to earn a child's trust. Children strike a good balance between caution and trust, given their limited abilities. They are humble enough to ask for help when they need it, and simple enough to accept it when it is offered. They believe, or at least behave as though they believe, that they can learn something new and useful from every person they meet. They remind us of the importance of interpersonal relationships, in which there is a constant, reciprocal enrichment through the knowledge unique to each individual person. 

They are wiser than most adults perceive them to be. They are not satisfied with superficial answers to the questions they have about life and the world. They sense that there is something more than the dreary routine into which adults too often fall. They are frequently delighted by the discoveries to which their curiosity leads them. They intuitively sense that there is nothing more important than living in a true relationship with the world and the people around them. That is why they are not satisfied with averages, in everything, they seek something more. A child's search for truth is pure and sincere, free of hidden interests and free of fear that the truth might reveal something they do not like.

They are not afraid to question the reality in which they find themselves. It is precisely fear that prevents many adults from sincerely searching for the truth. They are afraid that, if they really wanted to look truth in the eye, they might very easily discover that their lives consist of a multitude of wrong decisions they made because they had lost the childlike ardour within themselves for living in truth. They are aware that life in truth is hard; it allows no lukewarmness or self-deception; it demands struggle and perseverance in a search that lasts a whole lifetime. Therefore courage is needed to let children remind us how to sincerely seek the path of right living. Perhaps that is exactly what we need most right now.