Do you remember what you were like as a kid? Other than the obligatory baby pictures (of which there are very few because I grew up in the 70s) one of the few surviving images of me as a little boy is a photograph of me standing on a dirt pile. My super blonde hair is a mess, and I’m gesturing wildly with my hands while yelling something at somebody.
I’m not sure what was going on, but apparently four-year-old me didn’t appreciate how somebody was doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, and had no issues telling them about it.
Do you remember what it was like to be a child? Given my background I do remember some pretty tough things to go through, but I also remember an incredible amount of resilience. Maybe it’s because I didn’t know things should be different, but when you think that the life you have is just how life is, you have a tendency not to get bogged down in all of the meaning and trauma.
You just do things. Because that’s life, and that’s what you do.
Then we start to grow up. The more that we realize the truth about the things that we went through, the more we seem to attach meanings to them. Let me be clear here, I’m not saying that trauma isn’t real, because it is. I’m not saying that things that happened to us in our childhood weren’t terrible, because sometimes they were.
I guess what I’m really saying is that I miss being that child who didn’t know any better, and so just did things.
I made some amazing mistakes as a child. One time we tried to sit seven people onto a two skateboard catamaran-type setup, and rode it down a hill. I went home bleeding profusely from both elbows and one knee, and yet I remember that as an amazingly fun experience.
Or the time when I tried out for the school play, and ended up playing “Prince Charming” in a satire send up of Cinderella that had me wearing white silk clothing and a pair of 14-hole Dr. Martens air-wear boots. (To this day I am very grateful that this was pre-social media because there’s no pictorial evidence of that whatsoever).
It seems that the me who I used to be had a lot less baggage around trying and failing.
But somewhere along the line we seem to lose that. Maybe it’s because as children we have so much time, and usually, although not always, the ramifications of our choices aren’t that terrible. Yet the older we get, the more we seem to lose that childlike innocence that actually allowed us to not take ourselves too seriously.
And I really wish I could get that back.
Because I’ve spent the last 20+ years of my life playing it so “safe” that it’s hard sometimes to remember feeling “really alive”. Yet the times I have “risked it” and “gone for it” have actually for the most part turned out pretty well. Yes there have been a couple of stunning mistakes, but for the most part when I have swung for the fences, I have at least gotten a pretty decent hit.
But those times have been few and far between. Certainly too few to feel good about.
And when I look back as to the reason why I stopped taking chances, it seems to correlate around the same time that I became a parent, and realized that my choices could be detrimental to other people, and especially to the people that I love. In order to avoid causing them pain, I began playing it “super-safe”… so safe that I stayed in bad situations for way too long, justifying my ‘cowardice’ as concern.
And in doing so I really lost the sense of who I am.
There’s nothing wrong with being “responsible” and there’s nothing wrong with being careful. The problem is that like too much of any good thing, if that’s all you do, you end up being stuck in a place that you probably don’t like, and you don’t see a way out of the problems keeping you there. Too much caution leads to stagnation, and there’s no pathway to happiness from there.
Which means that I need to be more “teenage me” just with a little more wisdom that hopefully 50-year-old me can bring.
Maybe I was too dumb to know the difference, or too arrogant to be reasonable, but I honestly think 14-year-old me was having way more fun than 50-year-old me does. I might be remembering through rose-colored glasses, but I really miss the part of me that sometimes just “went for it” and did something spectacular (and possibly ridiculous).
I think he enjoyed life more.
So here’s to reclaiming the confidence of youth, and combining it with the wisdom that hopefully a few decades will bring. I’m sure there will be some spectacular screw ups along the way, but hopefully by taking more at-bats, I’ll end up with a percentage that is a better reflection of the person who I would like to be.
So here’s to finding ourselves again, and finding some joy in the process.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings