Innate Human Abilities

Human beings have a number of innate abilities. Having an innate ability means nature has equipped us to do something without thought and without being taught. One innate ability we all have is

the ability to learn how to walk. Watching the relentless efforts of an infant to stand and walk is enough to convince us of that. Yet, just as much as an infant strives to stand and walk, adults can interrupt, inhibit, or even damage that ability. Let’s for example take an overprotective mother who decides to carry her daughter until she is two or three years old because she is afraid of her baby falling or touching germs. This behavior would interrupt and inhibit the development of the child’s innate ability to walk normally. Imagine this same mother carrying the child until she was ten or fifteen years old. That would damage the daughter’s ability to walk, and only painful rehabilitation could correct it. For centuries, some members of Chinese society bound female children’s feet, believing that dainty feet were more feminine. The practice disabled these women for a lifetime. That is why it is outlawed in China today.

Another innate ability among the many we have is to talk. Even a century ago, the commonly held belief was that because infants couldn’t talk, they were unintelligent and couldn’t think yet. We didn’t realize how developed their brains were for absorbing and retaining knowledge. The only thing that wasn’t yet developed was the muscles of the tongue, which would enable them to form intelligible sounds. This belief led to people using baby talk, imitating infant’s sounds rather than teaching them, and in general not talk to their supposedly unintelligent children until much later. Although ultimately children did learn the language, the use of baby talk and lack of communication hindered the development of their brains and their grasp of language. Of course, we now know better. Infants are intelligent and capable of learning, so today every attempt is made to fully develop an infant’s ability to talk and think as early as possible.

All children are born with the innate ability to love. Infants instinctively reach for, smile at, and hug their mother-figures, thereby giving and receiving loving energy. The ability to love is there at birth; however, it must be nurtured and fully developed so it can become unconditional in nature. It is developed by a combination of imitation and guidance, just like the innate abilities to talk and walk. Children learn to talk by imitation; the more we talk to them in complete, adult-like sentences, the more they will be able to express their thoughts in complete, adult-like sentences. The loving of others and the loving of oneself needs to be modeled the same way, consistently, so that a child can learn to imitate that behavior. As infants need for us to point to things and name them, loving behavior needs to be taught by modeling and by pointing to loving behaviors and naming them. Just like we lovingly correct a child when he misuses a word or falls trying to walk, we must correct his unloving, conditional behavior, lovingly. Most importantly, we need to model loving behavior in a consistent way. We want people to love us even when we make mistakes. Wouldn’t it be nice for them if we loved them when they were less than perfect? I believe most of us love to love. We want to love. We are never happier than when we love. We need to love for our health and happiness.

As I said in the introduction, although the innate ability to love is there in every human being, for most of us it is damaged. Although some adults may be able to consistently give love, most are not. My father wasn’t; my mother was. As a child watches parents walk and talk and wants to imitate them, a child watches and experiences how parents give, ask for, and withhold love. They end up imitating their parents’ loving and unloving behaviors. As adults, they love in the same style they witnessed love being exchanged by family members (parent to parent, parent to child, sibling to sibling, parent to grandparent, and so on.) Sadly, the innate ability of loving, rather than being fully developed in a child, is damaged all too often.