Growing Up

“If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!”
- J.M. Barrie

 “One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.” 
- Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed


“Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall” 
- Paolo Nutini


“I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.” 
- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: The Revenge of the Baby-Sat


  “Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were.” 
- Dermot Bolger, The Journey Home


At Christmas Eve, I was struck by a sudden realisation- I am no longer a child.

I expected to feel like a grown up when I reached my 18th birthday but it didn't happen then, I didn't feel like an adult at all, all that changed for me was the fact that I could legally buy beer from a store or a pub and I didn't have to feel guilty or afraid of police when I took a glass of wine. Even the fact that I got myself a part time job, joined a political party and had to be responsible didn't make me feel like a grown up person, no, I was still a child who just did a lot of things and had many hobbies- work was and still is my hobby. I didn't know what growing up and being an adult meant, I could only guess. But now, half a year later from my 18th birthday, being a grown up is no longer a wild guess for me, I know exactly what it means for me.

You stop being a child when people around you stop treating you like a child, you grow up when even your loved ones see you as a grown up person. The knowing arrives when instead of a pile of presents you only get one present while all your younger relatives get four or five of them.
Just now it really starts to dawn on me that childhood is over,  I am soon moving out of my home,  I will graduate and never go back to high school, soon I am going to have to cook my own breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, I am going to have to worry about money and taxes and a whole bunch of other things needful for surviving in this world on my own.

People will start telling me to grow up, to not act childishly. No more stupid pranks nor climbing trees in the forest in the middle of the night. But that's not going to change me.
 I might be an adult but I will never be a complete grown up in my soul. There will always be a little prank to pull on somebody or a playfull understanding of how the things work

In my opinion, we should never truly lose our inner child, we should embrace it from time to time. Of course we should bare in mind not to lose control over ourselves because grown up children can get pretty wild :P To have fun and let your creative mind and ideas flow, that is the purpose and aim of keeping the child in you alive even when you are 60.

After all.... being a grown up can't be that bad. Nobody knows what they are exactly supposed to do in this world, so we should just let our imagination flow and see where we end up. =)

(Dragons)