I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and
Maya Angelou: A Letter to my Daughter.
honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing
up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in
our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are
still innocent and shy as magnolias.
We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go
inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only
place we really do.
On a cold sunny day, I sat in a shade watching three nine year olds move boisterously up and down, apparently in a celebratory mood. A mat lay on the grass, shabbily arranged flowers sat in a cut zesta tin, in the center of it all sat 2 miniature cakes and a few sweets, a matchstick stuck at the top of the bland cake. After the ‘serious’ preparations, I was invited to the birthday party for one of them, reluctantly I got up to please my little sister and looked on with amusement at the arrangement, the total expense as I calculated was only 2000 shillings. Of course to me these were peril shenanigans of which only pre-teens are capable because what kind of celebration was this, but as I sat there the excitement was contagious and I sang the birthday song, these kids were genuinely happy and celebrating life although as I later found out, it was not actually anyone’s birthday. To them cake called for a need to celebrate and birthdays were happy memories, something they wished they could do each day of their lives. So they did not necessarily need a reason to summon their happiness.
As I sat there, my mind went back to when I was 8, a friend’s birthday at school where I was one of the people at “the high table”…oh the good old days! I remember looking so happy in that photo. The sheer simplicity of their joy was perhaps something we grow to forget, buried under expectations, disappointment, heartbreak, school assignments, pandemics and a struggle to be somewhere before the age of 25. As we grow older, it feels like we are constantly in a chase, running after one or too many things that we never seem to grasp. We tend to forget to seek the joy we once found in the easiest things like breakfast or running because we thought the moon was chasing us, way before we knew the mechanics of the earth. Our search for joy is attuned towards larger, more expensive or more tangible things. We love to hate young kids, with their sunny outlook on life, finding explosive joy in the smallest things, so yielding and open. We have forgotten what made us madly happy in nursery school, a favourite rhyme, a sweet, watching a favorite cartoon etc
The constant search for happiness, joy or fulfillment as we grow older gets more complicated, there are just so many damn rules! We can’t even afford to be happy with just being there. Often times there’s too much pressure, from everyone and ourselves but I don’t want to exist, I want to live, I want to grow and live for every experience: the good, the bad and the ugly. So I say to the universe: “Bring it on!”.
And trust me, I am not some delusional optimist, perhaps a tired pessimist…
In your search for happiness I pray that you may not disregard the smallest things, may you remember to be firstly happy with the sun through the curtains when you wake up, the air, the blue or gray sky and I hope everything else will be easier. Just Be Happy.💕
MIDNIGHT BOTHER 