How Do We Mature? Children?

          Children are important in Siddhartha. They represent the enlightened and the misguided, the best and the worst of humanity. This binary has the effect of othering. When Siddhartha first meets the Buddha, he remarks on how much he is like a child. He approaches life with no needs or anxieties, only curiosity and peace. Siddhartha feels he is “at last free again and [standing] like a child beneath the sky” after he has his epiphany (97). Siddhartha also thinks his materialism was “childish.” He also describes his face as “equally childish, equally senile” as Vasudeva’s face. This shows the symmetry of binaries; everything exists together with its opposite.

Does life really have such symmetry? It seems like we can work and work, only to regress to an earlier state. We start out with nothing, begin to acquire more and more, and then gradually lose it as we age. I’ve grown more and more jaded with the world, and sometimes I wish I could summon my child self and be satisfied for a whole day by a toy, a book, or a video game. But there’s a societal normal that people should constantly pursue the next goal, whether it’s friends, grades, college, a job, or a promotion. This discourages experimentation and locks us into one mode.

          I believe that growing up involves making certain mistakes and losing certain things. And if one thinks about life, it really has symmetry. We start out with nothing, begin to acquire more and more, and then gradually lose it as we age. Possessions start to degrade or mean less as we get older and older. Maybe growing up is just the process of learning how to deal with loss and degradation so we can accept our fates. Siddhartha certainly has to lose everything to become a peaceful child again.

Reading this book, I was envious of Siddhartha and the Buddha for attaining such a state. I think that even for scientific exploration, my field of choice at this point, a childlike viewpoint is critical. Einstein or Copernicus wouldn’t have proposed their radically new theories if it weren’t for their fresh, childlike approach to problems that were considered solved for thousands of years. Here’s a video of one of my favorite thinkers and scientists, Richard Feynman, on looking at things in a childlike way.