Reclaiming Mystery

I have discovered how to reclaim as an adult the most impactful element of the brilliance of childhood. But the path begins with a contentious admission: I believe childhood is generally oversold.

In modern America, many encourage our kids to remain children as long as they can. We tell them: hold onto your innocence, retain the sense of wonder you have, avoid the stresses of being an adult, don't worry about the future yet - you have an entire lifetime of that coming. The trouble is that we forget how stressful being a child actually was. The social awkwardness and anxiety while chemicals rage within bodies whose minds have no experience to contextualize the many new and potent impulses. The bullies and clowns, learning about heartbreak and betrayal, the sense of constraint without understanding why we must be constrained. The boredom of always waiting. For many, the added struggle of parents who were themselves not emotionally prepared to take on the responsibility of children and the scarring that can leave. Childhood is hard. Then, one day, we emerge from that gauntlet, acquire ever-increasing daily responsibilities, and the burden builds, ever-increasing and harder to bear. And, by a trick of human perception, what we remember of childhood is the lack of burden, the freedom to choose, and the innocent ignorance of how limiting the future really is. Being an adult is hard, but we do not remember how tough it really felt even back then. The human mind sees only the alligator closest to the boat, and the crocodiles we share the waters with as adults can be large.

But there is value in remembering childhood. The biggest losses that we endure in growing up are the death of mystery and forgetting the capacity to feel it. What does the future hold? What will I do? You see a rock star, an athlete, a high flying stock broker or an astronaut, and the child thinks, "I wonder if I'll do that." The adult thinks, "must be nice!" and then moves on. "That is not for me." When I think of childhood, what I miss is absolutely not being a child. What I do miss, and what I am realizing was most essential, was the implicit assumption that anything is possible. It is not merely the ability to dream, or having dreams. Rather, the child approaches each day with innocent obliviousness of their limitations, and so are able to experience the world as fresh, limitless potential and full of mystery shrouding what will be. Remembering how to see the world that way, to feel each day as a new possibility instead of feeling its weight, is the value of recalling childhood. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on retraining the neural pathways to travel healthier roads. By deliberate and, often, guided practice, the automatic thought habits can be encouraged to tend towards focuses which are constructive rather than destructive. My own brain has many well-trodden paths which are certainly destructive to my sense of freedom to pursue dreams. Daily aches and pains, longstanding frustrations with people, society, politics, the job, and my own limitations come unbidden and simultaneously with attempted thoughts of future potential. Gone is any automatic wonder of what might be. My cynical mind knows what will be, and it is neither mysterious nor inspiring. I am convinced, however, that this is more a matter of neural training than hard reality.

In March this year, I caught full-on bacterial pneumonia. For two weeks, it was literally a nearly insurmountable ordeal to make it to the top of my stairs. Given that I climb, often at a run, six industrial stories of stairs daily, this development felt calamitous. After an ER visit involving a fair bit of blood, I finally was given several versions later generation antibiotics and after about 4 weeks from onset l started to feel human again. I have never been anywhere near so ill, and the absence from pretty much everything took a toll on nearly every aspect of my life. But, it turns out that catching a moderately nasty pneumonia might have been one of the best turns of my life. The antibiotics wiped out my gut bacteria, and to mitigate this I began taking probiotics, drinking kombucha, eating kimchi, making highly probiotic yogurt at home, and generally being nice to my body in a way I had not been for a very long time. As I recovered and felt a little better each day, it got to a point where I started to wonder if I could possibly keep feeling even better. I felt good. I felt great. I felt amazing. The overwhelming conclusion from this experience was that I had been living with toxic gut bacteria for untold years, and the pneumonia had freed me of them. I had returned, in some way, to a health state that I must have been in some point in history, but it had been so long since I felt that good that I had forgotten. I was hiking with my dog one day, my walk of any distance since I'd gotten sick, and I realized that my body was practically singing. It felt like all the joy, freedom, and strength in the world had entered my body, and the feeling, though existentially amazing, was somehow familiar. It took me a while to realize it, but what I was feeling was how it felt like as a child. No lingering ailments. No enduring worries, frustrations and fears. Anything was possible. I actually sat down and cried for the joy of it for a minute.

I concluded that day what I had been playing around the edges of in various ways for years; if I can retrain my brain to live on the pathways that were dominant as a child - those of innocent wonder, anticipation and acceptance - rather than those of complacency, cynicism, worries and fears which interweave my adult mind, then the world is once again a place of endless potential. I've got another few decades left of a reasonably capable body and agile mind. My responsibilities remain, and the constraints of physical reality (I'll never be an NHL player) apply, but those constraints are enormously less limiting than I think most of us eventually fall into believing. We can do more, if only we can reclaim the feeling of mystery that pervades the world as a child. What will I do? What does the day hold for me? I wonder if I'll experience some of the wonders I see daily. Rather than knowing I will not, if I can bring myself to wonder, and to feel the freedom to pursue it, then the answer is very definitely: I will experience more.

Holding onto that belief, training myself to think and feel that way, has been challenging. Telomere decay is real. Genetic diseases are real. The physical byproducts of decades of high stress are real. My many daily responsibilities are quite real. But my ability to choose how I perceive the world is also real. Which neural pathways dominate are up to me. Slowly, and through wavering but progressive effort, I am retraining my mind to recall the innocent possibility of the mind of a child. And the results are real. And occasionally wondrous.