Growing Up?

So here I am everyone: my last day of childhood.

Tomorrow I step off into the deep dark unknown, the wild and treacherous land of wicked secrets and attractive monsters - adultland.

Ah bugger.

I don't want to go, but I really must.

But before I do go anywhere, it seems there's a certain question I need to finally answer first.

Namely: how on earth does one 'grow up' in the first place?

So here we go.

For me, the process of ‘growing up’ has always been intrinsically tragic, a sad inevitability that could never be avoided, but  should nonetheless be avoided like the plague. The death of joy. The death of wonder. The death of innocence. Then finally … well death. I clutched to my fading childhood as to a tree in a tornado, legs blowing in the wind like streamers as time swept me away.

But, of course it was too late. It had been too late for years.

So my childish sentiment crawled to childish maturity.

It has always seemed to me a great paradox that the young should yearn to be older, while the old should gaze wistfully at their past as it runs by on little new feet. The young rest in the arms of the old, and the old adore the young. One longs for what is coming, the other mourns for what has been lost and left behind.

(Neither know what they really want, and the two really aren't that different. One just has more wrinkles.)

But this is where I'm heading it seems. My best days behind me, having reached the summit, and now I'm rolling down the hill to pick up my sore groaning body at the bottom, take up a walking stick, and assume my destiny as a cantankerous old man, ever barking on about how it was "back in my day" (yesterday) until eventually I keel over and die.

But my heart cries, 'No! It mustn't be.'

And indeed, it mustn't be.

For me, as I imagine most people would, I associated adulthood with experience and childhood with innocence, and the tragic journey of ‘growing up’ the loss of innocence,

sounding like a sad operation that must be undertaken,

like the neutering of dogs or castration of sheep.

But I disagree,

I daresay a mistake has been made here to juxtapose innocence and experience.

I daresay we've confused our understanding of innocence with ignorance.

Rather, I think we'll find that a man who has seen a murder, but did not commit it, is still innocent.

Or a woman who has witnessed a theft, but goes on a jolly chase after the culprit, is still innocent. And innocence is always to be prefered to guilt.

You can know things, you can look upon the world and seen things. But have no part in what you see.

You can see murder, and rape, and porn, and greed, and hatred, and evil, and you can fight back.

As far as I'm concerned, you're still innocent. If only you have the strength to hold on.

And I have no intention of becoming guilty, and rotting away in some inner cell moaning about paradise lost. Or worse, accepting myself as a criminal.

And yet I must grow up?

And so I shall,

Holding and taking my innocence with me.

Because,

Growing up is just as much about knowing what you must hold and take with you, as what you must leave behind.

You have to keep moving, you mustn't stop marching on, just don't drop what you really should not leave behind. Don't forget what you might just (when you are old and wrinkly) look at in a little child one day and miss.

I grow up, old, and wrinkly, but still I remain ...

a little child.