MATURING TO CHILDHOOD

i had the thought today that much of life is attempting to recapture the magic and wonder of childhood. there comes a time in life when the chambers of imagination are closed off as silly and childish. We're told to "grow up" and to "act your age." So we move on to speak of much more serious, adult-like things ... mathematics, rhetoric, science, logic, religion. and we leave the play room for the study, thinking that we have developed into real men.

but a strange, even magical, thing can happen if ever one finds the courage to look beyond the cold, automated world of adult rationality. if we look closely enough, (perhaps we should say if we imagine closely enough) we would notice within us an unsupressible longing for wonder. we find that we have often secretly, almost sheepishly, longed to be transported into the day-dreamy worlds of fairy tales. isn't this the tantalizing dream that has mysteriously evaded the grasp of philosophers and politicians and social theorists and scientists alike? we find this strange instinct within us to try to reconstruct those magical worlds using the only tools we have left for ourselves: reason and rationality. so we construct theorems and philosophies and laws and religions, all in an attempt to make time turn around and take us back to the home we can almost remember.

but we are sad to find that we have ever been infected with that unshakable bug called sensibility. we find that we've lost the ability to truly be silly again. and we wish that Peter Pan would once again become more real to us than George Washington or Frankie Robinson or the man that lives downstairs from us.

i think it was snow that led me along this journey. there was a time when snow filled me with wonder, an almost giddy kind of euphoria. i suppose it was because i never had to think about shoveling out a car, or paying heating bills, or driving on slushy, slippery streets. but that's precisely it, isn't it? it's precisely these thoughts that I find keeping me from the thrill of wonder. maybe the soul can't help but ossify with age and really become so crusty and fragile that it must think on these rather silly things lest it fall apart.

or perhaps we've misunderstood what it means to be a "grown up." maybe being grown up was supposed be mean that we could actually live in these worlds of wonder and magic, only we could do it as late into the night as we wanted. maybe it was supposed to mean that we didn't have to live in a make-believe world that was the size of our playroom, but we could live in a make-believe world the size of the world. maybe maturity wasn't supposed to be about becoming less like a child; maybe it was meant to be about finally becoming fully a child.