“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
—C. S. Lewis
There's a reason for the recent surge in 'adult' colouring books, the huge market for thematic board games (including winemaking, ornithology, and dendrology related games), and for adult-sanctioned activities like 'treetop-trekking' (which, let's be honest, is just a fancy way to climb trees). While some modifications to a task may occasionally be in order, the things we loved to do as children will often still be things we would enjoy doing now. Aside from death itself (obviously), there is no expiry date on the joy of building messy sandcastles, baking with a loved one, or looking for pinecones in the woods.
Remembering the things we loved to do when we were children can give us a well of ideas to draw from when it comes to things that will bring us enjoyment now. And our childhoods often hold greater treasures even than this. I'm talking about the activities that unequivocally absorbed us as youngsters—things that called to us very deeply at a young age. We might even call them passions, whether it was bug collecting or music or playing basketball or painting pictures. I'm sure we imagined doing wonderful things with those gifts. Children have such big dreams, don't they? I first heard the expression 'castles in the air' in Little Women, when Jo, Beth, Meg, Amy, and Laurie are all sharing their hopes for the future. I suspect that the things we loved doing the most as children would have had a place in many of our own personal castles:
"Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?" said Jo, after a little pause
...
"If I tell mine, will you tell yours?"
What did you love to do when you were a child? Is there any special thing that stands out? Have you done it lately? What if you did? Here are a few thoughts to consider on the subject of what we loved to do as children:
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” —Pablo Picasso
“It does seem that it is often in those years between 8 and 13 that a tiny spark is lit by a teacher telling you or showing you something, and that if you’re lucky, that spark keeps alight and gradually becomes the glowing fire of your lifelong passion and career.” —Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School
“I think a good trick is to go back and figure out what you liked when you were eight and nine years old. Before we discovered sex and substances in our teens, most of us, we had other ways of feeling good, and they tended to be instinctively creative.” —Jen Pastiloff, Yoga Journal May/June, 2020
"I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong, this is it." —E. B. White, letter to Stanley Hart White, January 1947
“I told a friend that I was trying to have more fun, and instead of pointing me toward the “Goings on About Town” column in The New Yorker, she asked me a question, “What did you like to do when you were a child? What you enjoyed as a ten-year-old is probably something you’d enjoy now.” This was an intriguing idea. I remembered that Carl Jung, when he was thirty-eight years old, had decided to start playing with blocks again, to tap into the enthusiasm he’d felt as an eleven-year-old.” —Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
What all of these thinkers (and more) express in common is that there is something about that golden time in each of our childhoods that reveals something inherent to each of us as individuals (and what it reveals may be wiser than we realize).
If you've never seen the movie La Famille Bélier (a French movie about the only hearing member of a predominately Deaf family discovering a passion for singing) it's worth the watch. Jen Pastiloff's quote (above) especially reminded me of a lyric from the final song in the film (an old Michel Sardou song): “Sans fumée, sans alcool, Je vole”: “without smoking, without drinking, I'm flying.” And that's what it is, these passions of ours; without any kind of intrusive stimulant, we fly. It's such a beautiful idea and so interesting the way that these passions are so often already present—already a part of us— when we are very young.
Gene Wilder was eight years old when he started trying to make his mother laugh, doing impressions and singing songs and all sorts of things (in an attempt to bolster her failing health through laughter). He was eleven when he approached his elder sister's acting teacher, Herman Gottlieb, and asked for acting lessons (though he was told to wait until he was thirteen). Wilder was fifteen when he acted in his first real play (taking the role of Balthasar in Romeo and Juliet), but it all started when he was very young.
As a child, Jane Goodall "watched insects and squirrels... [and] started a nature club with her younger sister and two friends"; they curated a museum of simple natural artifacts (like birds' eggs and flower pressings) to raise money for elderly horses. At age five, she was patient enough to hide in the hen-house for hours in the hopes of witnessing a hen laying an egg. She would grow up to be a renowned naturalist: the foremost primatologist in the world. She studied wild chimpanzees with a trust and a closeness earned through months of patient solitude. Jane's gift for slow, careful observation, as well as her love of the natural world, proved invaluable both in childhood and in later life.
Neil Gaiman would haunt the fiction section of his local library as an eight-year-old, as voracious a reader as any Matilda Wormwood:
I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.
They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader - nothing less or more - which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight year old.
—Excerpt from Gaiman's 2013 lecture to The Reading Agency
Are there exceptions to this rule? Of course. It wouldn’t be a very good rule if there weren’t exceptions. Julia Child had virtually no interest in cooking before she became, well, Julia Child—and I do mean basically no interest in cooking. She felt at a loss in the kitchen, as well as in life at large—for a very long time, in fact. She was in her mid-thirties before she ever remotely approached her calling. She moved to Paris because of her husband's work and—after trying hatmaking and a couple of other things—finally enrolled in cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu. Julia would turn 49 the year she finally published Mastering the Art of French Cooking and she was fully fifty years old before she became The French Chef on television. This being the case, she did always love to eat. Julia was able to vividly recall very specific foods from her childhood: the donuts left on a certain window sill, a particularly memorable salad had at a restaurant on vacation, a disappointing meal here and a revelation of a morsel there.
More often than not, there is something in our childhoods to reveal a glimpse of our grander purpose, at the very least. Pick up nearly any biography or autobiography and you are likely to read of something in that person's early days that foreshadowed what they were to become. It goes to show that if you are ever at a loss for what your special something might be, a good place to look for clues is right in your own childhood days, in the richest moments that you can recall. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." What 'castles in the air' did you build during your childhood? How now, that you are grown, could you reinforce or begin to build those foundations?
If there's an interest or a passion you'd like to delve into, we're always happy to help at the library! Connect with books, digital resources, tools, and more to start you on your way.
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Call in and talk to us:
Angus Library: (705) 424-6531
Thornton Library: (705) 458-2549
Come inside and talk to us: Angus Library is located at 8505 County Rd. 10 and Thornton Library is at 34 Robert Street, attached to the fire station. We are open normal hours and the library is free to come in and use (with masks and physical distancing). Computers are sanitized between each use and returned items are kept in quarantine for five days to keep you safe! Browse and borrow with peace of mind; delve into whatever it is that you love. We hope to see you soon!
Available through the Essa Public Library:
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child [large print] by Bob Spitz
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (a really good book about being creative)
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
Yoga Journal (May/June 2020) (source of the Jen Pastiloff quote)
Jane Goodall: 50 Years at Gombe: A Tribute to Five Decades of Wildlife Research, Education, and Conservation by Jane Goodall
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (source of the Gretchen Rubin quote)
My Friend Fear by Meera Lee Patel
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (an excellent book for all aspiring writers: see Dawn's post about Stephen King)
—Victoria Murgante
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