Growing up
it's not worth it.
“you don’t actually need to “Know” what you want, in order to do what you want. Children certainly don’t! They just do what they want! The problem is that we get inside our own heads. We force ourselves to justify ourselves.” – Visakan Veerasamy
“our senses of wonder, curiosity, imagination… are all often flushed away by the idea that we should ‘grow up’. ” — me
To grow up, or not to grow up… it’s such a popular tassel we humans seem to face as we settle into our monotonous and cushy lives.
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the worthwhileness of “growing up”?
Many people will pose that you should grow up when acting silly or rambunctious. Being a child-like adult mostly means that you are embracing that you just can’t help from enjoying all of the wonders of the world, throwing the idea of saving a serious face to the wind, who cares if you are to be wondrous as a child is, how is this such a terrible act? It isn’t, but many will try to trip you up, many may try to knock you into their frame of renounced wonder… let me tell you now, it’s not worth it, to grow up.
We all grow up, but in the sense you’re told to grow up when you’re only trying to have a little fun with a water balloon fight, chasing water slides, or doing other non-water fun activities. Who wants to renounce these sorts of things? Why should we not have a little fun? Why can’t we embrace the curious wonder inside of us? We can! and we can do it as adults I very well believe.
There are not good rebuttals to these questions, and the most common one seems to be “You’re too old for that”, too old to have some fun? Well I’ll be curiously turning my coffin to that reasoning! Haha, oh so funny how we humans want to renounce for others what we think we cannot have for ourselves.
In totality my conclusion has been this: It is not worth the cost to "grow up", it is much better to keep your inner child with you, even if it makes people look at you funny from time to time because they have "grown up"
Please note that when I say “It is not worth growing up”, what I really mean is that we should retain many of our child-like qualities as we grow older, because they are vital to bringing us and the rest of the world more joy. Your creative, and curious spirit is worth keeping alive much more so than how all together you appear to others; that’s the gist of my point, not that you shouldn’t take on more responsibility as you grow older or do grown up things.
Changing perspectives
Changing perspective from growing up vs not growing up, someone left me this reply which I thought was a fresh way of seeing the whole ordeal:
(good extra layer with the pun there too)
To be honest even the people who say they have renounced their child like wonder, the ones who claim to be all grown up and far past being able to take part in all sorts of fun activities (water sports included), these people are liars.
They are trying to save face because someone else convinced them they should be a big fancy grown up. Their tree trunk still contains the layer of their inner child, they may have wrapped many years of layers on top of it, but it’s still there. In this sense they still have it with them, they may have to dig a little deeper to undo their stuck up grown up pants, but it can be done no doubt: for the layer is still there with them, and it never left.
No matter who you are this means you also can explore your curiosity to it’s childlike end, you can ask questions that others find silly, you can be a dazzling fool (the intentional fool quickly became wise from his mistakes and lessons)
Creating things, curiosity & having fun
This also means no one is stopping you from creating things that you may have wanted to create but had a lick of hesitation because you didn’t want to seem childish. You like Lego and want to build some sick ass Lego sets? Why the frik not? Why shouldn’t you?
Maybe there is some real logic there, but most blockades to doing things that are actually fun but slightly childish go something like “I’m a big fancy grown up with grown up pants, I couldn’t possibly use these big fancy grown up pants to play with Legos” — Get over yourself you big baby!
My grown up idol as a kid was exactly who it is today, it’s the grown up who is going with the wills of their own way, the one who was a lot more likely to encourage me, and join me in my activities as opposed to the grown up who has their pants done up too high and mighty to do something just for fun.
that’s all for today, thank you so much for reading,
now go chase some waterslides or something,
your friend,
jack ♠️
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