Tuesday: Fun Again

When I was a child, I spoke like a child. When I became a woman I put away childish toys.
Myriam Maytorena 1975

How I have grown over the years. I remember well writing those words and thinking that I was so clever. Yet today I realize that I was saying I was not going to be driven to act based upon immature emotions. In effect, I threw out my fun-loving inner child with the bath water. Over time I have realized that what I truly was trying to get rid of was the child that was only acting to get applause or a reaction.

As you watch a child as it learns to play and explore the world around it, she is in a state of complete bliss and self-absorption. She doesn’t care if you are watching or not. She laughs. She giggles. She smiles. She is tickled by adventure. When one is a child and the music comes on whether imaginary or real, one dances with joy and abandonment.

Then one day something happens. We are laughing, playing and dancing and we look up and notice that someone is watching us. How they respond changes how we play through life. Sometimes the observers of our joy, will smile and even applaud us. Sometimes, the observers of our shenanigans will frown and scold us. The freedom of self-expression is then modified as we become dependent on feedback from others rather than our own drive to be joyful explorers of life. We are born to be happy. It is life and others that somehow teaches us to take the fun out of life and turn it into dys-fun-ction.

When I realized that this pleasure seeking creature was still a part of me only covered up by years of needing approval or fearing rejection, all of a sudden I was set free. I think that it was Gloria Steinam who wrote: The truth will set you free but first it is really going to piss you off.

Thirty years after writing the quote that is the start of this essay I would like to modify my comments about being childish to becoming childlike. When I was a child I played as a child. When I became a woman I recaptured all those foolish joys.