Can I just say Nick Hornby is a brilliant writer? I love this passage from the book:
None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map and left the boundaries exactly as they were.
Basically, that is dead on. And I see it everyday on the playground working with kids. Battles, fights, wars that you've swear you've seen on the nightly news acted out by adults. "I've got the better toy" turns into "I've got the better car" as we age. It's all silly, it's all childish. We are overgrown children.
Yeah, I'll admit that we've matured a little. We've become supposedly smarter, read more books by world-renown philosophers, and contemplated the meaning of life. But when it comes down to the essence of a fight, in the heat of the moment, we a act almost exactly the way we did when we were 5.
Another example: this little boy Isaiah invited to me to his baseball game this Saturday, cause he really wants me to come see him play. He's one of my favorite little boys ever, so of course I am overjoyed by this request. But why else am I happy? This little boy is including me. He's inviting me to his "birthday party," so to speak. You never wanted to be the kid that wasn't invited.
I'm not a psychologist, but this stuff is not too hard to figure out. And it all makes me laugh a little. And makes me feel crazy for ever thinking I am an actual adult.
I am a kid with grown-up problems.
ReplyDeleteHigh Fidelity is the tops!!! THE TOPS!!!!
ReplyDeleteheaven forbid we think we're actually adults. i doubt i'll ever grow up. and part of me is really ok with that. yep.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post ... did you go to the birthday party? If so, were you the oldest person there besides the kid's parents?
ReplyDeleteThe balance between what we should keep, lose or just carefully manipulate from our childhood is difficult to understand. The bottom line is we will always be children, no matter how old we are. In that respect, we always need to maintain that child in us because we look to the Father for nourishment. He can give us everything and anything we will ever need!
But I see what you mean about the childishness that we have as adults is more of an immaturity. You mentioned reading books "by well-known philosophers." I think one of the problems is that we are a society that seeks knowledge and intellect, as if that is all we need to reach the top of the mountain of our self-being. It's like, many of us have heard of or learned about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but the characteristics of "self-actualization" are just things we know and not things we try to develop in ourselves. It's a lack of allowing the knowledge to form wisdom through life-long experiences of joys, sufferings, trials and tribulations.
I hope you like the long response; I figured it would make up for my lack of blogging :)