Its a funny thing childhood.
We don't plan to have it. Its given to us by our parents or guardians. We have no say in the matter really.
In many ways childhood is a regimented period full of dates, milestones and routines. But the bits in between are so full of wonder and toys and comics and sweets, or at least they should be, that the boring bits like School and Sunday Nights just merge into the whole great adventure like one big penny mix.
The trick about childhood is to live it. Live it at the time which is exactly what kids do. They are their own best pilots. Kids are impulsive, spontaneous, unruly and errant and would never be bogged down by grappling with the burden of their future lives. Or at least they shouldn't be.
Childhood is like the patch a kid is planted in. Good soil and .... you get the picture. Like all flower beds and veg patches, some are well-tended, some revert to nature and some blossom like Chelsea. The best soil gives rise to anything and everything, weeds and all.
Childhood is that initial burn when a rocket blasts off, the brilliant ignition of tons of fuel bursting out like a geyser of heat and light.
Eventually the blast cools, the engines quell, the excitement wanes and the vessel settles into a slow and measured future joining the orbits of millions of others.
But, for those few heroic years the engines roared like a volcano and the sheer mapless miracle of youth vented out for all to see.
Its seems a lifetime ago now that miracle. I too have positioned myself into the steady chair of slow orbit and the brilliant sunshine of my first decade seems to be retreating like a fading star. My memory strains to see it at all these days. I am left with advancing nostalgia.
There appears to be no star before me. The future doesn't glow like the past. More precisely, growing old is not the boundless escapade of being young and possesses none of its sweet-shop allure.
Children have no need to calibrate their futures. They are wholly immersed in the present. I doubt if the past is any different to them, just a lean-to on today.
Alas I can't remember how I felt about stuff as a kid in any detail. I just have a sense that I enjoyed it and realise now that it was the most important time.
What do you think readers?
I think I completely agree with all of that, very nicely put. Mind you, I'm not done yet! (As a character in Blakes 7 once said, I plan to live forever, or die trying!)
ReplyDeleteI think childhood works so well because someone else is footing the bills. Sure you might fail at school but you can't really fail at being a kid. I sometimes wonder why I don't spend a wholle afternoon playing in a mud puddle any more or floating popsicle boats down gutters. There's almost always something more serious that needs doing.
ReplyDeleteAn eloquent reflection, Woodsy. Some days I'm still the imaginative lad of 10 inside, I just don't move so fast, or want to go so far :)
ReplyDeleteWell said Woodsy
ReplyDeleteI remember laying in the grass and now it's too itchy. Hot weather or snow didn't slow us down when playing with friends, as it does now. Time marches on.
Jim David
Sacramento CA
A poignant account of feelings that most of us share Woodsy. I believe that big part of that childhood nostalgia springs from the fact that adulthood never lived up to our expectations. And by that I do not mean things that do as an excuse for us grown-ups, social, familial, professional, or financial success. Being an adult, it just is not that big a deal. As a kid, you believed in that hundred per cent.
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