Current Release: April 28th, 2009 | Vol. XXX Iss. 10

Revisiting our inner childhood

by ali brown

aibrown@vwc.edu

You never miss a good thing until it leaves you. This overused cliché is actually one of the truer ones. Things that we take for granted in life do not reveal their true value until they are removed from our lives. Childhood is one prime example of that good thing. We never really analyze something as simple as spending all day watching cartoons as something that is going to be missed when it is no longer an option. To an adult, or someone who takes life more seriously than the average child, the greatest luxury in life might be to revisit childhood.

The joy of knowing and feeling the world as your playground is grand. Every human being, even if coming from extreme situations such as a strict household or a broken home, has served as a witness to the epidemic of childhood. It is unexplainable. Waking on Saturday mornings wanting nothing more than to sit on the couch with a bowl of cereal and watch Nickelodeon is what you used to live for. Not a care in the world ever crossed your mind, because you knew that your only priority for that day was to go outside and finish that clubhouse that you were building.

These are the curious years. You wanted to know all the wonders of the world but did not have the patience to learn them. These are the years when everything was called by a slightly immature name. Cuts and bruises were identified as  boo boos. The medicine for those injuries was nothing more than a kiss from your mother. The extra daily meal of snack time was looked forward to more than anything. This time in your life is irreplaceable.

However, you have to wonder what it was about those years that made us take them for granted. As a child, you are reminded daily of the seemingly luxurious life that adults have, not realizing that the luxury is only the effect of hard work and daily struggle. What was it that kept us in a hurry to become adults? Maybe it was the sense of freedom that was so appealing to the adolescent eye. The constant control from your parents and other authority figures could have served as a fictional motivation towards the transition from childhood to adulthood.

This motivation also makes us hypocritical in the long run. Anytime you see on television something that reminds you of the childhood that you once enjoyed, it makes you long for those days again. You feel that you would give up the world just to have a  childhood day. A simple memory can make you want to disown the very thing that you spent your adolescence striving for, and it may happen in the weirdest way. For example, going to see  The Lion King on Broadway sounds like a sophisticated yet fun event. It should be a very mature outing, right? It should, until you are sitting in your seat and you begin to notice the magic, music, costumes, and fun that are being produced. These things fill your heart with the same feeling that filled your heart years ago, when ignorance was bliss.

Childhood is a stage in life that is always left behind. It is not a stage in life that should never be revisited. No one is ever too old or too mature to enjoy the child within.