What Babies Teach Us

There is no denying that babies are the most adorable creatures on earth. Any baby is as pure as an angel and as fresh as a blooming rose flower. While we spend most of our time with them teaching them and guiding them along the way, they teach us a few things too, especially about what pure and true love is. The expectation is that things should always be the other way around: we teaching the babies, and not vice versa. However, babies have a host of important lessons for us as adults, but only if we pay attention to their whispers. 

The first lesson from babies is that we are not islands. Instead, we are intricately dependent on people who provide us the support system we need to get along in an otherwise very unforgiving and tough world. It is common to see people play it tough and act like they've got it all under control. To have survived to adulthood, however, we forget that we had to depend on an extraordinary amount of care from those around us. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the magical ability to turn a life around. A baby is a reminder that no one makes themselves and therefore indebted to people who care for us. 

Babies teach us what true love is. As adults, we tend to give love chiefly because of what others can do for us. For us adults, love is practically a quid pro quo affair. But look at any baby, he doesn't deserve much of anything. He can't do anything for anyone: he cries too much and he's practically asleep most of the time. Yet we devote ourselves to him nevertheless. 

A baby teaches us about the truest, purest kind of love, which means giving affection without expecting anything in return. That we should give help simply because one needs help and another happens to be in a position to give it. It is often very easy to think the worst of people whenever they do something we do not approve of. However, babies teach us that people are usually just tired and scared, not inherently mean. A baby may cry when he's having discomfort. He can't, however, tell us what is wrong with him. We often have to guess. What's amazing about this is how generous we often are in interpreting what could be wrong when a baby cries. When a baby cries, we rarely accuse him of being mean. When he hits or kicks, we are never too quick to judge. Instead, we often try to make him as much comfortable as we can, and this often works. Imagine how it would be if we could be similarly imaginative around adults. If only we could look beneath their surface behaviors, unpleasantness, capriciousness, viciousness, and grumpiness, and assume that he or she could just be at pain or exhausted. 

Babies teach us about hope. Irrespective of how cynical you are about life, hanging out with babies would most definitely change your perspective on life and give you hope that we all desperately need. It is easy to get sickened by our species' greed, status consciousness, and vanity. We should hang out with him as a corrective. He doesn't care what you do, where you live, what car you drive, or how much you are making. He only cares about laughter, smiles, friendship, and people who are generally nice to him. 

Remember, we were all like this once. It is the society that corrupted our once pristine minds and encouraged our unhealthy impulses. A baby is a political philosopher who constantly ponders how we might all be if only the world would be newly and better arranged. Let's not shy away from hanging out with babies, and most of all, learning from these little cherubs.