As often happens, I felt quite nostalgic about my home and decided to go to my favourite place to quench the thirst of my longing homesickness. We call it Madikeri Garden Park—a flower garden with enjoyable and refreshing layers of greenery, from where we can see a chain of high and low mountain scenery. It was a dull and drizzling morning but still my heart was adamant to go there, a place that usually gives me the ambiance of my home town. It is an hour’s journey from Namdroling Monastery. No sooner did I reach there, but I felt the presence of my home. I sat there on a roughly furnished garden bench. The weather was still drizzling and it invoked in me memories of my childhood searching for my lost cattle. Usually, sitting alone in natural settings brings a lot of beautiful mental images, but also sometimes crazy and stupid thoughts.
This time I was carried away by a crazy thought, something which was not relevant to me but still came to my mind. A thought of social youth issues. Since we are living in a society, we get touched in one or another by them, since newspapers, news channels and other social networks are filled with youth issues these days. Even terrorists are mostly youths. Generally speaking, youth issues are increasing at an alarming rate both in developed and developing countries. So, I asked myself if there is anything we can do about these issues. I felt dumb and crossed my fingers for sometime, but slowly the light of some tentative ideas sparked to life.
It is time to render a helping hand to striving youths. The time has come where they really need our love and care, as well as our guidance and advice. Someone wisely said that parents need to give their children their presence instead of presents. Some children of the rich are being spoiled by their parents who give them expensive presents instead of their full presence to guide them. Young people are reluctant to create problems as they are also human beings. Generally, the nature of every being is primordially pure and lucid but is stained by temporary defilements, which makes them create problems. As the Buddha said, “Though we strive for happiness, we don’t know how to accumulate the merit—the actual causes of happiness. And even though we don’t want suffering, we eagerly engage in non-virtue—the actual causes of suffering.” This is the error of all ordinary beings from the Buddhist perspective. Therefore, as the saying goes, “To err is human, to forgive divine”; youths make mistakes and those become social issues. It is apparent that the intensity of youth issues is parallel to the negligence of love and compassion, guidance and advice being provided by their parents, friends, teachers and leaders. Actually, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Sometimes we feel fortunate to have highly advanced material objects that solve many problems in a short time, but we hardly notice that our primary responsibility, giving time to our children, is stolen by this busy world in pursuit of materialistic development. Hence, they are bereft of love and care, guidance and heartfelt advice that no others can give but their parents and elders. Surprisingly, young modern parents hardly know what their kids are doing. Youth issues such as unemployment, depression, suicide, drug abuse, gang fights, rape, and so on, are slowly spreading like wildfire. Therefore, parents, teachers and leaders really need to join hands and solve these problems. But what are the ways to solve these problems? Some solutions that sociologists, activists, and others have found are guidance and counselling, rehab, and so forth. Among these, educating youngsters with love and care is the basis of all solutions. We know that some innocent youths completely lack love, care and advice from their parents.
The primary duty of youngsters is to get a good education in order to become responsible citizens. They need to learn and become skilful to do a job that the world needs. They also need to know how to read, write, think, understand, analyse and discuss issues of the world. They need to develop good moral conduct to handle things in a positive way. Sometimes they should be given a chance to prove themselves. They can have a positive influence on their younger friends. And that will make a huge difference in society and make the entire world proud. They are the assets for future world peace, so we must motivate and teach them responsibility and goal setting. In fact they need our full support and care, so they can see from their third eye. Only then will they become productive and full-fledged citizens of their nations and the world as a whole. We say that youths are the future generation of the nation, so it is our duty to shape them in such a way that will instil the sense of becoming a responsible citizen, with loving kindness and moral ethics.
Nevertheless, young people also long for a successful life and struggle to achieve it. The biggest problem these days is unemployment, which leads to all these social issues. Many young people study and try to find a job at the same time, but it’s not easy. Most of them do believe in themselves and know how to overcome great disappointment and unsuccessful beginnings, and they do not give up. But some end up doing wrong things creating youth issues.
So in a nutshell, youngsters are the makers of our world’s new history. Our beautiful world needs these youths in order to lay the carpet for harmonious and peaceful living in the future. If every parent, teacher and leader takes care of their kids, students and the youths of their nation respectively, with unconditional love and guidance, then I bet we can hope for happy and peaceful living for the future generations.
Let’s all make time for our kids, students and youths, to help them make changes before it’s too late. Let’s build a continuous bridge of peaceful and harmonious atmosphere for our future generations. Let’s give our presence rather than presents to make our kids, students and youths the assets for future world peace.
It’s as simple as that. We can also accomplish the purpose of the following Buddhist verse which is one way that all Buddhists aspire:
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the causes of happiness!
May they be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!
May they never be separated from the sacred happiness devoid of suffering!
And may they dwell in boundless equanimity that is free from attachment and aversion!
No sooner had I finished with this verse than I woke up and found myself drenched by the rain. A garden caretaker came up to me and said, “It’s time to close the garden park.” I looked at my watch and found that it was on the cusp of closing time. I wrapped up my stuff and walked out of the garden.
By Lopon Pema Wangdak
PMTC, Namdroling
