childhood

Yesterday, I was mulling over how some moms and dads seem to rush their young ones into looking and acting like grown ups way too fast. Some dress their kids up into lilliputian versions of themselves and some teach them to behave like little ladies or little gentlemen although I do find those quite cute and endearing most of the time. But I think there are some who go a bit too far, usually with little girls, in the dress up department with the Lolita outfits, makeup and snapshots of them in supposedly sexy/model-like poses. Other children are disciplined to behave like marine soldiers.

I believe that there's a time for everything and for now, let's let our kids be kids. Allow them to cling on to their innocence for as long as they can, to look at the world as one big playground where everything is fun and possible. And when they're finally all grown up, they can find that special memory in their souls to savor and remember how wonderful it was being a kid.

Childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?

We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Mood Music: My Wish by Rascal Flatts