Every day I saw him walking around the town. There was pride in his face and a radiance in his eyes that verged on divine. What gave his visage that rare quality was his grandchild he carried in his arms – a bonny baby girl – as he went out for his walk. Today the child has grown to be 4 and she walks besides him chattering incessantly. Yet the joy in his face is undiminished. It was merely symtomatic of what I call the ‘ Grandparent Phenomenon.’
It is a neat trick the Nature plays on human mind. When one’s own child is born, a new equation is established where the child and the parents get bonded to each other. The joy of seeing the child grow makes all the travails that get woven into it worthwhile. This bond loses it’s sheen once the children enter adolescence. But the nature has it’s own way of rejuvinating the mind.
This rejuvenation happens when the parents enter their late forties. There is a subtle craving to listen to the baby-cry accompanied by an urge to hold a baby in arms. At this juncture, the Nature is preparing the would-be grandparents to welcome the next generation and to share the responsibility of their children in rearing their babies. This is the Nature’s way of preservation of the species and has been going on for eons.
Ask any grandpa or grandma. They are sure to vouch for the fact that they see in their grandchild’s every milestone of development, re-enactment of their own childhood.Often they are surprised to see in their infant grandchild’s pranks and oddities, pages from their own infancy of which they only heard from their parents. It is like watching a vintage movie of which they, till then, only read about and then suddenly they get a ringside view of the movie that the Nature has specially screened for them!
But,a bit of sound advice for the young: Like summer follows the spring and the winter follows the autumn, human life span too has it’s seasons. If seasons fall in place at apt times, life gets in sync with the Nature. If not, the life becomes an empty race on the synthetic track of dreams.
