A SIX-YEAR-OLD SEVENTY-YEAR-OLD

It is often said that as people grow older and their memories fade and they spend more time talking about and remembering the past that they are entering their second childhood. Perhaps the real truth is that it is better to remember a sanitized version of the past where the “good old days” were really good because the bad has been forgotten than it is to think that the rest of one’s life may be filled with severe limitations on one’s ability to do much of anything except exist.

And yet there is much to be said about a second childhood. When I reflect on my own life, something that I do not do often enough, I do wish there was more of the six-year-old in this seventy-year-old body and mind. No, I do not want to go back to those days nor do I want to have the body of someone much younger, say a twenty-year-old. I am as old as I am because I have been blessed with good health. And I am thankful, especially when I see some of my contemporaries needing bottles of pills to stay active and alive and whose bodily aches and pains prevent them from doing much of anything.

That being said, it is so easy as we grow older to take life for granted. One day follows the next and not much changes. We have seen and experienced so much that we tend to take most things in life for granted, both the good and the bad. “There is nothing new under the sun” seems to be our mantra and we’re sticking with it. Nothing seems to shock or surprise us anymore. And the older we get, shock and surprise becomes less and less.

That is why, the older we get, the more we need to be childlike. For me it not only would be good but it would also be wonderful to be a six-year-old seventy-year-old. Imagine what it would be like to be excited once again by all the simple things in life that one was experiencing for the first time: a rainbow, a birthday present, a drive to get an ice cream cone, winning a game of cards – all those things we take for granted and find so routine as we grow older.

None of this is to say that the life of us elders is dull and boring even if there are limitations on how much of this life we can enjoy because we are not six years old. It is to say that, no matter what our age, we need not lose that joy of life that six-year-olds see as what life is supposed to be all about anyway. Yes, they will be disabused of all of this as they grow older and take on more responsibilities and as their bodies and minds age and betray them.

So what? So what is wrong in finding the little pleasures in life and making them out to be more than they really are?  What is wrong with waking up every day looking for the small surprises that will come our way, the little joys, the life-giving and not life-sapping events that make us look ahead to tomorrow for the next bit of wonder and awe, wonder and awe that have become routine but which should not?

There is that inner child in each and every one of us. Perhaps that is why Jesus routinely, I think, sat down and made his disciples sit down with little children. He reminded them and reminds us that we can learn much from children and from the child inside us.