I like frisbees and scooters and dinosaurs and pirates and space aliens. I like Marxist philosophy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, the study of corporate consumerism, and Allen Ginsberg poems. There is an unresolved dichotomy in my life between the imagination and wonder of childhood and the freedom and responsibility of becoming an adult.
Am I still the kid who worried his mother to death when he went to Greg’s house after school instead of coming directly home because he simply had to see every character’s ending in Street Fighter 2? Was that me who used to “rebel against the system” by smoking cigarettes outside of the skateboard shop while I should have been in my Junior High classes? What was my rebellion accomplishing? Perhaps a wavering transition from glassy-eyed explorer of this vast, new world to somewhat less relentless, jaded explorer of the slightly aged, but still vast world.
This childhood exploration manifested itself in often inconsolable ways and my desire for autonomy had similarly catastrophic results. When I was five, I wandered out into the woods, believing I could explore the vast land before me and make it home in time for dinner. As I wandered, I thought of the magic of the world, witnessing for the first time, the truthful beauty of nature—a downed sycamore infested by termites, to me, was more beautiful than anything concocted by Monet or Rembrandt. But as I delved further and further into the woods, I became increasingly suspicious that I would never return home. Daylight was turning to twilight and forest sounds—the unyielding chirp of the cicadas, the formless hum of the wind against trees, the fallen branches like atrophied limbs cracking against leaf carpeted floor—were penetrating my ears. Eventually two hikers heard my pensive sobbing and returned me to my mother who was, as she tended to be, worried to death.
I still long for exploration, never content with my lot, always pursuing some barely attainable goal. Somehow, though, the magic and wonder of witnessing the beauty and truth of the world for the first time is fleeting, transitory, like a train passing through the fog in the distance. It has already become less clear, less pristine than that day in the woods. And soon, as this colossal image of perfection stares steadfastly at us, we will become bored, jaded, and the tracks and the memories will be all that remain. I fear this.
I fear the ceasing of exploration. I fear the consequences that result from the transition from student to teacher. Having to abandon the role of the wide-eyed learner and wonderer in order to instill the knowledge of 59 trimesters of amazement and sorrow and discontent and angst and complacency into someone else is, in a word, frightening. And, in another word, beautiful.
At times I find myself wanting to shout, at the top of my lungs, “I’m not ready to move on! I refuse to grow up!” As my time inches by, my possibilities cascade from infinite to finite; my future focuses from a blurry vision of greatness to a crystal clear image of the bleak possibility of mediocrity: punching time clocks, combing my hair, keeping my life within the confines of a profit margin. I fear this image, too.
And, at the same time, I find myself increasingly ready to abandon adolescence in favor of a more liberated, more responsible lifestyle. As a child, the notion of never doing what I was told was—to those who were telling me what to do—out of place, irresponsible, unacceptable. Now, those figures of authority are all but disintegrated. And the notion of autonomy is comforting, sought-after, a beacon to strive for. I am only now beginning to realize that non-conformity is not a punishable offense, but rather a virtue; for only the greatest can aspire to non-conformity and only the non-conformists can aspire to greatness. Responsibility and non-conformity are not mutually exclusive. They never were. The fact is, those two things fuse together like heated atoms. A covalent bond of growing up.
It is these dominant ideologies in society—these notions that non-conformity is wrong, that to succeed we must adhere to the capitalistic tenants of selfishness and competition—that marginalize and ostracize and transform greatness into mediocrity. Our schools are set up like factories to produce a surplus of workers-as-machines. The elitists can then dominate and oppress and strip the working class of their identities. We are left to shield our eyes and fall in line to the beat of the corporate drummer, oblivious to the exploitation of ourselves, our minds, our lives, and our freedoms. It is only before this process has taken its effect that we can see, with sober senses, the beauty and truth of life. By the time we exit the school system it is perhaps already too late. Unless you are somehow able to figure out a way around the status-quo, to break free of the ruling class’ tyranny, the dominant ideology has already taken its toll. And that is the poignancy of childhood: the idea that we are, as yet, unaffected by our society. We are blank slates, running, jumping, exploring, and learning.
I never once turned to my childhood friends and said, “We are going to play Proletariat and Bourgeoisie. I’m the Bourgeoisie. You’re the proletariat. I’m going to oppress you and you’re not going to be able to do anything about it because upward social mobility is so rare in our class system.”
Instead, we pretended we were dinosaurs or pirates or space captains trapped on an enemy planet. We had only our pantomime claws or pantomime cutlasses or pantomime phasers. We had only our imaginations.
And we dreamed!
We dreamed that we would become fire-fighters who saved women from burning buildings or FBI Agents who had to shoot the bad guy to save the good guys. We didn’t want to shoot him, I swear! But there was no other way. He would have destroyed the whole city if not for us; if not for our dreams.
We dreamed of becoming NBA stars, down by five with 18 seconds left. We shot the three pointer, stole the inbounds pass, and shot the three pointer again. The crowd would go crazy, absolutely insane over our triumphs. We would have won the town’s affection. The hoards of fat men on the sidelines drinking beer would deify us; would deify our dreams.
No one ever told me, “Darin, you are a small, skinny white kid. You have no chance in the NBA. Play tennis. Or learn about the NASDAQ.” No one said that because it would fall under the category of “squandering a child’s dreams.” And people—these imaginary people who know better than to tell us these things—know, just like I know now, that the dreams don’t need to be squandered, they will fall by their own absurd merit—or, they will soar above the realm of realism, into the idealistic future of attainability, to be filed with the lottery ticket winners and small business sensationalists, in a manila envelope marked “Anything is possible.”
If growing up means abandoning the belief that anything is possible, then under no circumstances shall I ever want to grow up. Without this faint belief instilled into the recesses of my mind, my life will become a bleak struggle through daily routine. As I age, I realize that humans are bound by the finite. If I drop an apple on earth, it will fall to the ground at a rate of 9.8 meters per second for every second it drops. I hate this. I hate the inertia of the world. I want change. I want surprise. I want to drop that apple some days and have it float towards the sky. I want to drop the apple and find a new apple, still in my hand, where the dropped apple once was. I want to drop the apple and have it turn into a racecar upon hitting the ground, zooming off without ever giving any inclination to why or how it became a racecar in the first place. And some days, I want the apple to fall at a rate of 9.8 meters per second for every second it drops. Is this so much to ask?
I’ll be mentoring a child soon and, as of right now, I know nothing about this child or how I will mentor this child or how mentoring this child will help me. But I do know it will be a constant exploration, a learning experience involving both the responsibility of adulthood and the imagination and wonder of childhood. I’m ready for it.
And maybe I am ready to shed the exoskeleton of childhood. Maybe I’m ready to look upon my past as something that was and will never be again.
And maybe I don’t need to turn my back on the principles of childhood so quickly. Maybe I can continue to look out at the stars on a clear day and try to ignore the fact that I can recite their gaseous compounds. Try to take myself back to a time when I knew nothing about those stars aside from their bright, penetrating beauty. Back to a time when clouds were the bean bag chairs of the gods and plants grew simply because they were beautiful and they wanted to show you their beauty. When running in meadows and climbing trees were the only components of a day. When falling down and scraping your leg was simultaneously an inexhaustible tragedy and a daily activity. When dinosaurs weren’t fossilized remains dug up and speculated on by archeologists, but rather colossal beings, alive within the land of imagination. When my father wasn’t an alcoholic, he just worked late and my mother wasn’t falling out of love, just seeing things differently. When the past was still the future and my regrets were still dreams.
Why must I give these things up? These things that I used to hold so dear, these things that once made up my entire existence—why can’t I hold on to them? Carry them around in my pocket with my cell phone and business cards? Why does growing up have to change who we are? Can’t we retain the best aspects of childhood and adulthood, to form that simple covalent bond? I have this mounting suspicion that we can.
I now look out at the sky and say to myself, “That cloud is cumulus. And it is beautiful. It is a beautiful, cumulus bean bag chair for the gods.” I can look at plants and remark, “I know you exist because your chlorophyll mixes with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen in a process known as Photosynthesis. But you’re still beautiful.” Dinosaurs, though now just archeological remains, were once colossal beings, and will remain colossal beings in my mind. I can still rebel against the system in my own way and play street fighter 2 whenever and with whomever I please. And I can still shoot the bad guys and the three pointers, but now I have another set of dreams and aspirations, involving breaking free from the tyranny of a money-laden culture. And all are still attainable because of that little manila envelope marked, “anything is possible.”