Responsibility... It's a word taught to us from elementary school all the way up through life. You have to be responsible for your homework, for remembering to tell your parents that your teacher wants to have a meeting, for getting yourself a job, a scholarship, a career, a life. As you get older, responsibility becomes greater and greater. You are responsible to make money to pay rent and bills and you're responsible to get those bills paid on time and you're responsible to keep your own home and a family.
Responsibility. It's a word that children fear. Kids are always so eager to grow up but they are afraid of the responsibility that must come with growing up. But life is not about responsibility. It is about children. It's about kids. Inside, you should never grow up.
Think about it for a moment. As you get older, you become less open to experience and more conscientious and more agreeable and conformed. You lose childish joy in the small and simple things. You no longer smile at a bird sitting in a tree that is trilling a beautiful song. You realize that "adults" are not entertained by staring at the people driving the cars that you are passing.
It's about joy, hope, and faith. As we grow older, it is harder to hold onto these. Essentially as we get older, we tend to think of ourselves as more and more experienced or wise. But are we really? What more do we really know that we didn't know as children? As children, we knew that friends mean more than anything else. As children, we knew that smiles can be found anywhere and any situations can be made funny in some way. As children, we dared to hope and dream that the world is ours. When we are old, we cherish memories instead of the present, we tend to see the darker side of the world, and we realize that we have little to no impact on the world. So we begin living like the past is more important, that the world is dark and evil, and that we can't make a difference. But if we think like children, we live like we can make a difference and change things and then we do. We can.
Everyone grows old at some point. Life is cut short and we end up realizing that there are so many things we wish we could have done but didn't end up doing. We all get sucked into thinking that the world is black and that we are just one person who has no say in what is happening and has no power in the big picture. Never lose the child inside of you or you will live without hope and without joy. That is a life I never want to live.
