TEXTS I CARRY
On Children · Kahil Gibran
A passage I carry with me about the lives that move through us, but are never ours to own.
When I was sixteen, my mother pressed a slim copy of The Prophet in my hands and said quietly, “This is one you need to read”. I remember the way she looked at me in that moment — as if she were bracing for the hardness of my life before it arrived, and wanted these words to reach me first.
I didn’t understand all of it then. I only knew it felt serious, like being trusted with something adults rarely say out loud. I’ve returned to this passage on children at every turn since — as a student of education, as a woman and a wife learning that the people we love are not ours to control, only to love, as a mother, and as someone who walks with other people through their own seasons of becoming.
YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT YOUR CHILDREN
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself
The come through you but not from you
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Which you can not visit, not even in your dreams
You may strive to be like them
But seek not to make them like you
For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday
You are the bows from which your children
As living arrows are sent forth
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite
And he bends you with his might
That his arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness
For even as he loves the arrow that flies
So he loves also the bow that is stable
— KAHIL GIBRAN, THE PROPHET (1923), “ON CHILDREN”
I don’t have anything more to add here. I simply want to place these words where you can find them, the way my mother once placed them in my hands.
As you read, perhaps one line will find you in the way it once found me.
— Jo-Anne
