Parent is there so that children would love life

I don’t like football. I don’t feel anything when players are chasing the ball across the pitch. I declaratively support Red Star and once my friend Djole took me to see the derby at Marakana. And that’s it.

It wasn’t like that in the past. As a pre-school student I preferred to spend my Sundays listening to the Time of Sports and Leisure on the old radio emitting tender sounds – radio Symphony. As I remember, the show started around 3 p. m, after Sunday lunch, but we had to turn on the radio well before lunch so that the lamps in the radio could get warm. Sometimes that was not enough, but we had to slap its side with a palm, as if slapping somebody on their cheek, until we heard speakers outshouting each other at the speed of three hundred words in a minute.

Then my dad died and the pictures of a green pitch with football players running around slowly started fading away. A couple of years afterwards, football was no longer interesting for me.

When I think about the things that we as individuals and as a community strive for, I am pretty sure that we are not born with love for a certain profession. We are born with the capacity for love, but whether love will be developed depends on a personality who will present the beauty of the profession to us. With my mother I grew to love cooking, with my grandma I baked bread and my uncle bought me my first fishing rod. It is logical for
this person to be a parent, but most often we have many teachers.

There is a scene in a film 127 hours, where the main character, who is fanatically in love with nature and gets trapped in a gorge, reminisces about his life. In a take of merely five seconds it becomes evident why he loves nature so much. When he was in pre-school, at dawn his father would get him out of the car, put him on the blanket, tuck him in and place glasses on his face. At that moment it would begin to dawn…

It can also be the other way around, we may develop hatred or contempt for a certain profession because we saw someone working peevishly, against their will, nervously, torturing themselves and others with this scene or even worse, making us work while being so nervous.

When you were a kid, if you replaced a tyre with a nervous father who was swearing all the time, you would probably leave the job to a professional justifying yourself by not having the skill or simply by not wanting to handle it. But several decades ago if you and your father put cabbage into the container to make winter provisions feeling joy, joking, helping each other, I am sure that today you wouldn’t miss the opportunity to enjoy doing the same activity with your children. The same way they wouldn’t miss doing it with your grand-children in a couple of decades.

Regarding school, all of us had a teacher or a professor who made us love a certain subject. (Imagine if there were such teachers for each of them?) Unfortunately, in my case there were many more toxic teachers who made us develop forbiddingness towards the subjects they taught.

For example, in my primary school there were biology teachers who were not pedagogically educated and divided the class according to the level of tidiness of a notebook, to teachers’ pets who were getting As and the rest of us who were required to learn definitions by heart and were getting Ds and Cs. In high school my biology teacher was a boring man who hated himself and the rest of the world and who would rather sleep throughout his life if he could buy himself food and beer without going to work. He would enter the class frowning and say: „A new lesson, read it out loud paragraph by paragraph starting from this row“; and then we would teach ourselves for months while he was hiding behind newspapers and dosing off.

Lucky for me, biology wasn’t the same as nature that I always loved more than the city because I spent almost every weekend at the countryside with my mother, but I would have been so much happier if I had teachers who
would make me additionally acquainted with what I love.

I was lucky with technical subjects. My mum’s colleague from the office, where I spent a lot of time, repaired TV sets in a shop, as a side job. Having seen I was interested in engineering, at the time at the level of Lego puzzles, he gave me his old blow lamp and some components, so I started making various objects. Soon after I started doing my apprenticeship by his side in TV repair shop Electron (for 70 years the best repair shop in
the city!), and already in my seventh grade I received my first pay check, which wasn’t a high one, but still it was the first. I stayed there for the next couple of years.

Then, there was the secondary technical school, The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and little by little I became an engineer. I worked hard and loved working, but to be honest, I loved working alone. I suppose it is like this with the majority of us who are the only children. I needed a new teacher to teach me to work with people and there came my wife and my children – especially children. I think they invested a lot of effort, but they taught me to like working with people. Now, if things had happened differently, it would have been better if it were the opposite, but it is what it is… People come and go through people’s lives. And they all have a task. Thanks to some people children learn to love sport, nature, mountaineering, thanks to some others they learn to love history and mathematics, thanks to someother ones they learn to fish and camp, take photos or do the gardening.

However, parent’s task is the most important. Parent is there so that children would love life!

Translated by Jelena