There are no bad people, just bad parents, bad circumstances and bad habits. We come into this world bright-eyed and pure and society tells us what we are, orders us to conform and limits us in our development.
I grew up in a foreign country where I looked and acted differently from everyone else, where I wasn’t accepted because I wasn’t a part of the norm of what is and should be. I learned from an early age that I was different, but back then different meant something bad and it meant I had to change, but I refused.
Extremely extroverted as a child, I turned introverted and found comfort in meditation from the age of 14. I didn’t know it then but I was just trying to make sense of the world that too me looked fragmented and shattered.
I’m 37 years old now and the world still is, but there is a new normal brewing, a new hope for the future and as we as a society have gone from dictatorship, to communism, to capitalism and ultimately over- and self consumption, now there’s a generation of children growing up with technology at their fingertips and a fundamental belief that different simply means different.
Whether you’re gay, straight, black, white we can now allow our children to stay pure, to pursue their uniqueness and to embrace difference rather than calling it names and trying to kill it. We are finally acknowledging the power of embrace, the strength of diversity and finding our true selves instead of simply being plain selfish.
As we go further into space and our understanding of the universe expands, our world becomes smaller and as much as people talk about technology disconnecting us from each other, we live in a time where we can teleport ourselves around the globe in the blink of an eye. Transmitting thoughts and conciseness across the continents with a single tweet, exposing art in seconds rather than centuries and ultimately bridging the gap of our limited physical existence as we hitch it to one’s and zero’s so we can be more as one.
I was born on this day in a country on the verge of destruction and struggled for 30 years before I found peace and my true home which turned out to be a place inside of me rather than a geographical location. And this is what I will teach my son, that home is where the heart is, that he can be whatever his heart wants him to be and that most of the answers we look for externally, already exist inside us and are waiting to be found.
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