Childhood just gets farther and farther away, is all. We enshrine it as the origin myth of the Self, so when we lose touch with it (or just interest in it!) it feels like a kind of heresy, like "losing my religion." But there's nothing especially sacred about childhood, except the slowness of time and the vividness of the senses. Otherwise it's a fairly miserable time of life, as I remember it -- living utterly at the mercy of mastodons.
Sometimes, that's how I feel. I see memory enter the room of my consciousness. I feel the richness of a long-gone moment, I feel the lachrymose joy of bittersweet remembering, and the feeling that I can't look at it hard enough.
As the years pass and there are fewer ahead of us than behind, pressures abate and memories naturally come forward with their pleasures and pains, lessons learned, knowledge gained and we use those memories to help us determine, in our later years, the meaning of the active, adult lives we've led and to prepare us for an acceptance of death.
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