Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Saturday 16 July 2011

Never grow up?

I often envy my daughter...

When we are children we are bold and fearless. Especially young children, just starting out. We jump off high walls. We investigate draws full of sharp knifes and we run with scissors. We climb to the top of the tallest tower in the soft play centre (even if we still haven't figured out how to get down without help). There is always someone there to catch us when we fall, wipe our tears, kiss our bruised knees and tell us that it will all be alright.  The world contains endless possibilities and chances to get 'it' right. We love, we live, we learn and we have nothing to hold us back. Not even our parents can really contain us, although they will try. 

And I realise now that the only time I was ever really 'FREE' was as a child. The older you get the more life grips you. We collect people, problems, experiences - good and bad, happiness, pain and sadness that tie us up in knots and make it impossible for us to go back. The older we get the more complicated it gets and we are never really as free ever again. And I do wonder, if only we had known back then, what we know now, would we have been in such a hurry to grow up? 

"Wasn't it easier in your lunchbox days?
Always a bigger bed to crawl into
Wasn't it beautiful when you believed in everything?
And everybody believed in you?

Wasn't it easier in your firefly-catchin' days?
And everything out of reach, someone bigger brought down to you
Wasn't it beautiful runnin' wild 'til you fell asleep?
Before the monsters caught up to you?"

(Taylor Swift - Innocent)