On Being A Grown Up

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of chats and discussions with close friends and family members around the subject of ‘this grown-up life we are living’. I’m not entirely sure how or when, but somewhere in the past decade I appear to have become a proper grown up. This strange and worrying reality sneaked up on me rather unannounced and decided to become a permanent fixture in the lives of myself and the people I grew up with.

There are certain aspects of This Grown Up Life that can be scary – knowing they are here, or just around the corner. There’s a part of me that wants to hide under my duvet and not face any of it.

This Grown Up Life involves financial responsibility and serious decision-making.

This Grown Up Life involves life decisions, bill payments, and pension plans.

This Grown Up Life involves mortgages, weddings and babies.

This Grown Up Life involves forward-planning,savings accounts and credit-ratings.

This Grown Up Life can seem a bit too much to take in all at the one time.

Without ceremony or even the slightest warning, life has become a maze of responsibility, new stresses and concerns, and a faint tug in my heart for the simplicity of my younger years. Through my rose-tinted glasses, I look at my teenage years and early twenties as if they were perfect and without stress – which of course is absolute nonsense and they were full of stress, worries and a different set of challenges.

Whether I or my friends will be successful in finding the secret to making it successfully through this grown-up life is irrelevant. It’s happening now – we cannot stop time ticking by and our main concern is to find a way of facing this new set of challenges  head-on – to find a balance between the idealism and of our younger years and the responsibility and reality of our world as it is now.

Is it even possible to find a balance?

Would it make more sense to face life through the eyes of an eight year old?

…..I want to go to McDonald’s and think that it’s a four star restaurant.

I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make ripples with rocks.

I want to think M&Ms are better than money because you can eat them.

I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends on a hot summer day.

I want to return to a time when life was simple.

When all you knew were colors, multiplication tables, and nursery rhymes,

but that didn’t bother you, because you didn’t know what you didn’t know and you didn’t care.

All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the things that should make you worried or upset.

I want to think the world is fair.

That everyone is honest and good.

I want to believe that anything is possible.

I want to be oblivious to the complexities of life and be overly excited by the little things again.

I want to live simple again.

I don’t want my day to consist of computer crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in the month than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness, and loss of loved ones.

I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow.

So…here’s my checkbook and my car keys, my credit cards and all my responsibility.

I am officially resigning from adulthood.

And if you want to discuss this further, you’ll have to catch me first, ’cause,

“Tag! You’re it.”