500 WORDS, DAY 107: Keeping One’s Inner Child Alive

Aldous Huxley, one of my favorite writers, wrote about the importance of keeping one’s inner child alive even through the hardest of situations. What is so unique about a child’s perspective on the world? Well, one thing I think makes a child’s perspective on life not only very unique and fresh, but also quite wise in a way, is that a child is usually hopeful and looking forward to the future. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately when I question why it seems like a lot of people seem to become unable to properly cannabis as they grow older, even if they have a history of habitual use and it’s always been something they enjoy. I feel like sometimes, as adults, life and the world can really feel like responsibilities more than anything, and it seems like there’s not much more we can look forward to, like our cards have been dealt and things are what they are. This, I believe, is where the extreme importance of keeping one’s inner child alive comes in. Einstein, another genius, yet much better known than Huxley, also wrote about the important of having “holy curiosity,” something which we all can tell is possessed by all children. Once we start labeling things and sorting the world out inside our minds, aided by the not always helpful input from parents and society in general, we start losing our childlike wonder and we start looking at every as commonplace and boring, if not completely monotonous and depressing. So, how can we avoid this degradation of our spirit? How can we continue living life with enthusiasm. Well, I would say the answer lies within the problem itself. The problem is that we label things into categories we think we’re familiar with. However, one usually finds, when one learns something new, that perhaps there’s a lot more to a specific subject than we ever knew about or even thought possible. Everything can be either superficial or deep, because everything has layers, and layers imply depth. We decide how deep we want to go. Now, you might say you don’t feel like diving deep into anything in particular. Well, I can almost guarantee you that if you jump into something, or even better a few different things, those things themselves will end up pointing you in the direction of other things, things you will be truly interested in, whether they are related to the things you initially jumped into or not. Even the things we end up outgrowing serve to teach us or show us something about ourselves and who we are, or who we aren’t. I, myself, struggle with change, and with remaining excited about the future even as I know it’s guaranteed to bring me pain. As children, we are at times too naive to understand that change simply must mean pain. Not all change brings pain, but the changes of life in general are most certainly guaranteed to bring us pain. When we are children, it seems like our hope and wonder often overpowers any fear we might feel, any resistance to change. As we grow older and wiser, we must learn to be prudent, but we should also remember not to end up completely closing our minds and our hearts, because we might find ourselves lost, in pain, and with no safe place to turn to, not even within our heads.