Ahhh, To Be Young Again…
I remember when I was a young’un and read an exhilarating superhero or fantasy book or saw a great movie and then wanted to act out certain scenes with the neighbor kids. There was so much excitement and anticipation in setting up the scene in the backyard, playing it out and fighting over how it should end or which way the story should go.
We lived in the outskirts of Boise, Idaho where neighbors were a couple acres apart, there were lots of trees and open fields to play in, and nothing, I mean nothing, but imagination just waiting to go wild. Kids have this blessed way of finding fun anywhere in anything. They see a filthy irrigation ditch as a grand rapid begging to be tamed or the mighty ‘ol Mississipp or a part of the Amazonian Rain Forest or the Nile cutting through a blazing desert. The possibilities were truly endless and kids always have the time to stop and picture it all. If the weather kept me indoors I would turn to books for future inspiration then make a cave out of old blankets flung over chairs and search for hidden treasure with my brothers.
As children, our eyes are wide open. We see everything as new, fresh and full of wonder. We actually look for new experiences in everyday things like a squirrel in a tree or flowers in a field or maybe even an old beat-up car in someone’s yard. Nothing is lost on a kid’s imagination. The anticipation of what could happen next with no fear of the repercussions that responsibility teaches us. At some point we begin to see the realities of life, our mind’s eye dims and, ever so slowly, it robs us of our imagination – we become adults.
I miss being a kid. I miss pretending, living in a world not like my own and it changing on me whenever I dreamed it to. We certainly can’t go back and I most assuredly don’t want to relive certain times of my youth but it’s still fun to slip back into that pretend mode through a good book and relive the excitement of our younger days.
Let’s escape back to those irresponsible days and take time to read a book and really live it. It’s how I want to spend a part of every day; simply being free to dream!
Readers Unite!
M. Chris Johnson