Growing Up

I've always loved trying to figure people out! Can you think of anything more fascinating than people? I'm told that as a child when my family would have parties, instead of playing with the other children I would often sit with the adults, just listening quietly. I don't know exactly why, but I imagine I found adults had more interesting things to say and more complex personalities to understand. I could sit there, mostly unnoticed and just soak it in. This will sound a little silly, but in a way I felt like a secret agent, trying to infiltrate the adult world and understand the secrets hidden therein.

My mom called me the low maintenance child--content to listen quietly or play in my room by myself (which I could do for hours). I was rarely bored. When people were around I would listen and try to understand. When alone (times which I treasured) I could take my observations and use them to create stories. Oh how I loved my stories! They always involved complex, conflicted characters who at first seemed small and unimportant, but then discovered hidden abilities which allowed them to become brilliant leaders and save the day. I didn't write many of them down, but I acted them out, either with my toys or just in my head.

So that was my childhood. Quiet, but exciting to me. I imagine it's not an uncommon experience. Life is a little different now. I've grown up. I don't seem to have time to create the stories I did before. It's not that I don't want to, there are just more important things to occupy my time. I need to be responsible. It's of course good to grow-up, though I have a question. Does growing up mean you stop imagining? Does it mean the stories should come to an end? No, I don't think so! Those stories are really important. If you look at them closely enough they will show you who you are and who you believe you are capable of becoming. We cannot, we should not forget that! If we lose that belief in ourselves and our abilities to conquer evil and face insurmountable odds, if we lose that vision of the great work we are intended to do, we wont do it! We wont try! No, I think it's important to remember.

I still think up some stories and I can get entirely sucked into a good novel. These things help me to remember, but a big difference between being a child and now is that instead of acting the stories out in my mind, I have more of an opportunity to live them. It's exciting. Instead of pretending to be brave and speak out against the evils of the world, I actually have to speak. I actually have to feel opposition. I actually have to choose to have hope that all will turn out well, even though I do not have control over the end of the story. I can't just sit quietly with a group of adults and observe the way I once did. If I kept everything inside that would be wrong, a waste of all that practice I had acting these things out in the stories. I have to actually live!

It takes courage to live! In life we don't have control over the end of the story, we don't know what the other characters are thinking, and we can't take our words back when say something stupid. It would be easier to just live in a story... but where's the glory in that?