Childhood

A few days ago I was thinking about aging and the end of life, today a quote from an essay by Erik Kolbell in today's NYTimes got me thinking about childhood. Here is the quote....


"Most children exercise very little power over the decisions that affect their lives. They don’t decide who their parents are, where their family will live, where they will attend school, when they will reach puberty, who will or will not befriend them. They have limited control over their athletic skills, their looks, their wit, or whether, in the great Serengeti that is their schoolyard, they will be predator or prey. They are as much the subject of their story as its author. "


I wanted to put it next to a quote I've been saving for awhile from a middle school teacher, Susan Graham, from her blog, "A Place at the Table." She wrote, describing middle school,

"It is a wonderful/awful time of transition that is both thrilling and bittersweet. As the innocence of childhood slips away, you can't blame young adolescents for longing for one more year of magic. They may hide behind their blasé masks of indifference, but they still want to be surprised. They still want to believe."

Do we think of childhood as a time of innocence, or as a time fraught with danger and unpredictability? Is a having a lack of control part of what makes childhood magical? I wonder if not having those decisions and responsibilities in childhood allows for the innocence and the magic. We certainly sometimes talk about children who had to "grow up too soon." On the other hand, childhood can be a cruel place in big and little ways. For some children the inability to control their surroundings, or their fate, can be frightening and damaging. For others, perhaps, freeing.

Perhaps at the end of life the same factors come into play. We may lose some of our control over where we live and how we live. We could allow that to let the magic back in, giving up those responsibilities may free us to be surprised. To believe.