Young at heart? Mary Brown’s Thought for the Week

‘I can again delight in simple pleasures.’

‘When I became a man I put away childish things.’

Despite Jesus’ injunction to become as little children, Paul seems to be suggesting to the Corinthians that adulthood is to be preferred. I hate the term ‘second childhood’, and do not appreciate medical staff and workmen talking to me as if I were a child, but I confess that in old age I am learning to appreciate some things I had previously put away as childish.

Perhaps the most important is the childish sense of wonder. I can remember looking up at the stars as a child and marvelling at them. After years of reading about, but not understanding, space travel, black holes, light years, now, although it is harder to find somewhere where stars can be clearly seen, I can just look up with childish wonder, and forget about the science. I can again delight in simple pleasures: watching the sunset or sunrise, or the moon moving across a dark sky, or the gleam of a glow worm. Now I only enjoy splashing in puddles when I am wearing wellies, but I do love scuffing the autumn leaves.

Cooking is something I no longer enjoy, but I remember the childhood delight of a boiled egg. The wartime ration was one a week – they were a real luxury. Now I appreciate how wonderful they were, and are.

In childhood I was never ashamed to ask for adult help. Now, when even opening a jar can be beyond me, I have to ask again. The help usually comes with a smile, acknowledging that we are all interrelated.

In childhood, apart from school days, we were free to do what we wanted when we wanted. Time then seemed to pass agonisingly slowly and to stretch ahead to infinity. Now, although I know I will not be here much longer, and time seems to have accelerated, I seem to have that childish sense that I have all the time in the world. I can use the time I have left however I want. I am learning to read a novel in the daytime without feeling guilty. I can write this at 3am, and sleep later. While everything I do now seems to take longer, I need to remind myself, as I did not in childhood, that my time is now my own.

Not all childish things were positive, however: I remember the bitter pain of the playground, ‘You’re not my friend any more’. Now my friends leave me for death, and the pain is just as bitter. But I would not want to put aside childish love of, and care for, friends.

When I started to put away childish things, leaving the security of childhood for my teenage years, my mother used to quote, ‘Let go and let God’. I never found that easy, then or in adult life. Perhaps I need to return to a more childish way of being; to recapture the ability to just be – to live in the moment, whatever that means. While childhood always seemed busy, it was also a time for just accepting what was. Perhaps before I die I may even be able to say with Julian of Norwich, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. 

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