Sunday, August 19, 2012

You don't know what you've got... 'til you cling to it with both hands and say "you ain't goin' nowhere"

I was thinking recently how nothing lasts. It was after reading quotes from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt's Benjamin says it, to which Cate Blanchett's Daisy replies "some things last".
When I thought about it, I realised that I agree with Daisy much more than Benjamin, because I don't think anything does last. Not really.
When we transition from childhood to adulthood I think we lose a lot of who we are. We lose that innocence, that purity, that drive to find the answers to the simplest questions. And as I was thinking this I realised something:

I don't want to lose my childhood.

I don't want to lose the way I see the world even now as a teenager. Things like the way I still love to dress up as a different character of personality whenever I am home alone because I love to imagine myself as part of another world. Or the way I still stare out the car window in wonder at the shining lights and towering buildings every time I visit the Sydney CBD at night.
Or the way I am still more in love with the idea of love and the romance of it than the person who is doing the actual romancing.

Although I certainly want to fall more in love with a wonderful person than an idea, I don't want to stop living vicariously through characters, at least some of the time. And why would I? Why would I want to stop imagining myself as Rose DeWitt Bukater, being sketched like a French girl and romanced by a southern gentleman? Or as Anne Shirley, finally realising after years of the most adorable flirting that I don't want golden sunbursts or marble halls, I just want the clever and gallant (and gorgeous) Gilbert Blythe? Why would I want to lose that?

As an adult, I still want to view the world with the hope and wonder of one much younger than myself. Not exactly through rose-coloured glasses, but more through whatever comes just below that. Gold-coloured glasses? Mauve, maybe? Glasses that let me see the innocence and purity that I know never really goes away, just becomes a little more obscure.

In some ways, I guess I just have to believe that the loss of innocence and idealism we experience is not due to us finally seeing the world as it really is, a la Lily Allen's Smile, but  more because we think that we shouldn't try to believe in magic anymore. Yes, magic, for what is an ability to see a better world if not magic?

If I have anything resembling power or free-will, I'm going to do my level best to hold onto my childish beliefs, because without them, what is there?