DE-ADULTING

Children know stuff already at birth.  They know things inside themselves at a cellular, genetic level.  Stuff they do not know they know.  When Uninterrupted or judged by the big people around them, they have access to an endless, limitless source of information: information that can fascinate and startle the adult world of "what is for sure," and has always been "that way."  Adult big people tend to believe that "they" the new little ones, must learn what we learned, and in the same way we learned it.   We came to believe that.  That little person still inside us, our own innocence, knows and feels what is right and true too.  It wants to come to the surface and be lived out.

Sometimes, one of these new beings falls through the cracks of the everyday world, and is seen as a prodigy, brilliant, exceptional, even special.   Yet, she may simply represent all the other brilliant, special and exceptional young people that have gone into hiding from a world that does not see them, thus they do not see themselves either. 

There is no fault here, nor blame, nor make wrong.  It is an adult thing.  We did not grow into adults, we were pushed.  Where it all came from, I do not know.  Doesn't matter.  Well, it does matter a little.  Ummmm, a lot.  Perceiving myself as an adult, and all the self-identities and beliefs I carry, can cut me off from children, from play, from instinct, mostly all that is real and true and loving. 

An adult person is a set of beliefs and behaviors, not our own.  An adult is self-perceived   as a woman or man that behaves in specific ways.  She or he often speaks in a voice of authority, seriousness, and a language never quite their own. Take the adult out of me, and what is left?  Me.  The original me.  In my case, when I was 12 years old.  I remember me.  I freely danced, did hand springs, somersaults, rode my bike down hills that the adult would never do.  The 12 year-old, yet to be adult me, laughed a lot and made other people laugh.   Not at other people, but with them.   He found it difficult to take seriously much of what the adult me now finds important, often requiring a therapist, a "serious" talk or quite possibly, another meeting.    

A young child once told me, "I don't need you to be with me.  I need you to be with yourself.  When you are with yourself, you are with me."