The Kid Inside Us

I was thinking earlier today about how much more complex life seems now.  I'm in college and I've got a job and rent to pay and tests that decide my future and I kind of take care of myself now so I feel like I've got a million things going on at the same time.  It made me think how I miss so much from my childhood that just made being a kid great.

I miss sharing my ice cream cone with our dog.  I miss thinking 11:00 was late.  I miss Jamal Anderson and the "dirty bird".  I miss walking from my back yard and into the woods and stepping into a while new world.  I miss having every Disney movie on VHS.  I miss watching TBS's Dinner & a Movie on Saturday nights and only understanding about half of what went on.  I miss being able to sport a different basketball jersey to class every day and it being cool.  I miss kite day at school.  I miss the rectangle pizza in the cafeteria that was terribly unhealthy for you.  I miss birthday parties where you got to go down slides and got bouncy balls as party favors. I miss dressing up to the extreme every Halloween.  I miss being freaked out by "Who's Afraid of the Dark?".  I miss roller blading like it was awesome.  I miss having lighsaber wars in the basement. I miss lowering the basketball goal to 6ft and dunking off of my neighbors skate ramp. I miss camping in the back yard.  I miss taking all of the sofa cushions out and jumping over them onto the pullout bed like I was in the NFL.  I miss my Bat-cave play set I had.  I miss Growing Pains and Boy Meets World.  I miss doodling in church.  I miss bringing lunch to the swimming pool and staying there all day.  I miss arguments over which Ninja Turtle was coolest, which by the way, is still Donatello.

All in all I think I just miss not having any pressure put on me.  I could just do whatever I felt like doing. But if I'm really honest I still do about 75% of the stuff that I just said I miss, so my childhood isn't quite over yet.  Maybe one of these days I'll grow up and want to do things like go to bars and stuff like that, but thats not really growing up to me.  To me growing up is more about figuring out who you are and where that is going to take you in life.  I guess that's why I finally stopped doodling in church.  But the greatest thing about growing up is that you never have to stop being a kid.  You never have to give up the innocent heart that you started out with.  Some people may call it being naive but I just call it being hopeful.  I hope that somehow what innocence I have left will rub off on the people around me, and then the people around them.  Until soon, even though it may be tiny, it has made a difference.  Who knows, I could just be rambling into cyber space about nothing.  I just hope that somehow we can see the best in situations.

I hope that we can see princes in "street rats" and great lovers in hunchbacks.  I hope that somehow through all of the craziness in the world we can find the time to think about what the 10 year old version of ourselves would think if they saw us today.  We have all of these standards to live up to but it's important to not forget where we came from.  The kid in us never dies, it just gets hidden more than it should.  So sometime, dig up your childhood, and dream all the way to Infinity and Beyond!

T.C. Street