And one fine day, the child grows up.
I look back at the years that have gone by. We always think that life was so much more simpler then. We were at ease, and not strained by the petty ordeals that life brings with it. At every stage, when I grumbled about something being hard; I was always told this is easy relative to what lays ahead. School is easy, college is hard. Collegy is easy, Working is hard. Working is easy, life is hard. So in all brevity, being an adult is hard.
Why? I think in our formative years we don’t really circumscribe ourselves to a comfort zone. We don’t have fixed notions because every day is new – a discovery. It’s still too early for us then to grasp the world, and be fixed in our mundane lives. Since we aren’t what we call to day ‘worldy wise’ or ‘experienced’, we lack all inhibitions and absorb things with an open mind. Why they call a child’s mind innocent is because it still hasn’t been preconditioned to speculate, and doubt everything. The world isn’t all black and white then. Rather it’s full of colors. Painted a very pretty picture, haven’t I?
When we grow up, at some point or the other, we have to leave. Leave what or who or where we belonged to. It could be separating from the ideals we believed in or from the home we lived in. And when it seems difficult to do so, we’re told that its a natural process that everyone faces. Just like life and death.
Life is transient. Yet, we realize it or not, change is hard to deal with. It is so because it asks to break from that comfort zone. It asks to go fly and conquer the world and yet retain your grounding. It asks from us to break free from inhibitions. And probably most importantly, leave home and build your own life.
Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”
Yet for me, I would say that Childhood is the kingdom where nobody leaves.
