As they say, nostalgia is a very powerful drug, and most of us get carried away by the memories of our childhood, longing to go in the past and live like a child again.

I found myself doing the same and hence, this post is a dissection of what I talk about when I talk about living like a child. An analysis of what kids do.

I can do anything

Recently, I caught my friend telling “But I don’t play football”. This is a very telling difference between a kid and an adult. For a child, everything is possible and anything is doable. School + Singing classes + 2 hours of cricket under the sun + doing homework after coming home can all be done in one single day.

If kids are playing cricket but someone got a football? They’ll go Sure, let’s play football. There are no plans or fixed mindsets. But. if I am playing cricket with my friends now, and someone suggests football, most of them will give excuses(including yours truly) like “I don’t have proper shoes”, “We might get injured”, “I am not a football guy”, etc.

Or a few more that might say “I am an analyst, I can’t write poems!”, “I am a movie guy, I can’t read books”, “I am just a nerd, gym/sports is not for me”.

Maybe that is the reason why teenagers adapt to new technologies so quickly — because they don’t have any limiting belief about themselves.

Curiosity comes with a medium

When I was in school, curiosity for me was reading — I was so engulfed by it that I hid a magazine under my textbook and pretended as if I was studying for the exams. But I was not.

I remember being so in awe of Disney Adventures because it featured kids from Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, etc. That was my way of compensating for living in Bharuch. That magazine wasn’t available in my city and hence I couldn’t read it every month. Today, I can buy any magazine I want or ready any book I want(a subtle kindle owner brag) but do I do it? The latest issue of “The Week” is lying unopened on my desk.

For you, the medium might have been something else, but curiosity surely found a way to slip through.

No expectations

I catch myself judging the experiences I am having — If I am meeting friends and we just talk for an hour and come back, was it even a good use of my time? Or when I write in my night diary that “Today was an average day”.

As a kid, I had none of these shenanigans. Every day was a new day and if in the end, nothing extraordinary happened, there was tomorrow to look forward to. Also, as a kid, it was impossible that nothing new didn’t happen every day. Because there were activities, playing, friends, etc involved so much, something did happen. Maybe the bar of “extraordinary” changed as I grew up.

Look, I am not going to treat the excuse of time, that as kids we didn’t have any responsibility and had unlimited time. That’s not true. Looking back, sure we used to fret on trivial things but then, those were the world for us. And regarding time, right now we have 8-10 hour jobs, then we had 6-7 hour schools.

Anyway, this was my brief thinking on how to be like a child again — maybe not in terms of responsibilities but in terms of thinking.

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