The game of life

Life is a game. Only a parent can help children master it. How?

By not being a parent. By dropping all perceptions of “parenting.” By abandoning the idea of ownership. Stop trying to be a “good parent.”

When becoming parents, we often pamper our children in their early years, making them feel that life is a luxurious place to be, fulfilling all their desires, and letting them fall into all social traps. Then we suddenly see them plunge into the mad rush for marks, ranks, grades, and college admissions. We witness them suffer, helplessly.

Life is a game, made to be played to the cosmic tune.

However, humans look for purpose and meaning in it. We tend to intellectualize everything, make everything serious, and then suffer our seriousness. We suffer from our conditioned mind that keeps telling the stories of our manufactured selves.

When we suffer that self, we look for self-help, read books, watch videos, and repeatedly listen to self-proclaimed gurus, never understanding that the issue is our perception of self. So, “self-help” is contradictory; we can’t help ourselves because the self is the cause of our suffering.

As a parent, do you want your child to go through the same loops and lose innate creativity, self-directedness, and a sense of adventure and fearlessness in the process?

Oh yes, you do, because you still lie to yourself that we all turned out fine, and so will our children. That's what conditioning is. We tend not to look at what could have been, make adjustments and compromises, to try and make peace with what is.

Yet, we don’t find peace within ourselves and cannot truly create an environment of peace and calmness in which children can blossom. Children learn the most by just being and observing us.

Every child is born wild and free. Every child has the potential to blossom into a life that dances to the rhythm of nature, finding bliss in every moment, experiencing wonder, and becoming joy and love.

Life is a game to be played. With creative abandon, inspiration, adventure, and losing the sense of self in the process. Be alive to every moment.

But the problem is you want your child to win it because the world has told you how important winning is.