As we get older, it seems to me that colours appear less vivid, flavours and smells less potent, our surroundings less able to make an impression on our conscious minds. Maybe that's why, when we think back to childhood, summers seemed longer and brighter and bluer, and winters were whiter and crisper and colder. (Though that last part may have been down to the absence of central heating when I was a boy.)
Our senses are keener when we're younger, and more susceptible to the 'moods' with which each season of the year enfolds us. Also, because we're more optimistic, enthusiastic and eager to experience each brand-new day, we perceive everything around us in a particular way that is peculiar to the period of childhood and adolescence, but which does not continue with us on our journey through adulthood.
Sometimes I look at a comic or toy and get a flashback to an earlier time in my life - and for the briefest of moments re-experience a more colourful, sharper, keener, livelier, brighter and better world than the one I wake up to each day as a grown-up. It's almost like, as children, we have a special enhancer fitted to our senses, through which every experience is routed to deliver optimum impact. However, this enhancer has worn out by the time we reach the end our third decade, and the world never seems quite the same again.
That's why Christmas, Hallowe'en, Easter, etc., appear to be but pale shadows of their former selves as we get older. In fact, it's only the dim and distant memory of how such times were to us as children which lends any faint hint of magic or enchantment to current celebrations. Without the glow of past years to illuminate our present ones, Christmases and birthdays would mean little or nothing to those of a certain age.
I can remember, as a child, standing at the top of the hill on which my then-house was situated, and the horizon seemed an almost infinite distance away, the sky a vast expanse of drifting clouds against an azure backdrop a million miles high, and my surroundings were easily able to accommodate visions of fairytale kingdoms of the kind depicted in storybook illustrations. (I remember when I first read The HOBBIT as a 10 or 11 year-old - the remote mountain I could spy from my back garden was surely the same Lonely Mountain under which the wicked dragon SMAUG's stolen treasure resided.)
Whenever I stand at the top of that hill on a visit to my old neighbourhood today, the sky seems far lower and the once distant horizon only a stone's throw away, encompassed by boundaries which, if they existed in the days of my youth, I never noticed. Metaphorically speaking, once you start seeing the frame as well as the picture within, you know that you've run out of pixie dust.
Unfortunately, you only get provided with one portion in life - and it's not enough to last the journey.
Did you ever get to see that mountain close up or even climb it? I think if I could see one on the horizon as a kid, I would be compelled to one day get there!
ReplyDeleteNever really occurred to me, JP. To me, mountains were always seen on the horizon, and I guess that's where I figured they belong.
ReplyDeleteI remember that as a child I had no concept of "the future" because the future meant being an adult and no child can have any understanding of what it means to be an adult. If someone had asked me, aged 10, to imagine ten years hence it would have been a meaningless blank but now I can imagine ten years hence with no problem. I believe that childhood is the only time in your life that you genuinely live for the moment. I've read reprints of Marvel comics that I read originally as a child and tried to imagine how I would have experienced them back then but it's impossible because I know too much now - I can read things into them that wouldn't have crossed my mind back then. Childhood really is a time like no other.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it depends what age the child is, but I know what you mean. As for living for the moment, that's true, but I was always looking back as well. Children can look forward to some degree 'though, I think, because they're always wishing their lives away until the next Christmas or Birthday. It's more difficult (if not impossible, as you suggest) to imagine something in the future that we (as kids) have no experience of, but I think we're capable of imagining the future if it resembles something we already have had a similar experience of. (Perhaps.) On the whole, you're right 'though - kids generally tend to live in and for the moment.
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