Childhood is without doubt the simplest thing...

Childhood is without doubt the simplest thing. Not that things were easy when we were little, but they were difficult in the simplest of ways.  We understood things to be how they seemed to be. We acted from outside exactly how we were feeling inside. Friends were friends because we liked them the way they were.

As grown ups we may realize we might not have liked their certain habits if they were our friends now, but we certainly didn’t think the same way as kids, did we? We realize they were one of the best friends and memories of our lives anyhow, and yet we wouldn’t have been friends if we would have met them now. Simple yet strange. I realized that the best friend I had as a child was actually quite a bully sometimes. But nevertheless was a true friend. Used to lie a lot too.  Simple harmless lies. I knew they were lies, but I would rather pretend believing those to be true. Just because his lies were funny, enjoyable. We don’t think the same way if someone lies to us now, even if its mind-blowing hilarious. I really missed that friend a lot when I moved cities. I later got the news that he died in a road accident when we were in 10^th. I don’t know how true the story is, but I heard he didn’t like the food at home that day and wanted to go out to eat. Funny, I really used to like what he would bring in his lunch box.

It was funny as kids, that when we wanted to swap lives with someone, it was just because they had some supercool stuff that we wanted too. And then we would also like to come back to our own lives after getting that stuff. Because we loved our lives the way they were. As of now, we depend on showing off. We do things to show off to those people whom we don’t like at all in the first place. As kids, we had no struggle. We had the simplest of passions. We didn’t achieve anything spectacular, but weren’t we still satisfied with our lives? Satisfaction is what really matters in the end, and that was what we were even after having nothing to show about. We always thought ourselves to be a successful person (even though our grades didn’t reflect our beliefs). Although learning those small and big words, we never knew what the three letter word ‘Ego’ was. We would be sad when ‘we’ would get hurt as kids. Today, we rather get angry, because our ‘Ego’ gets hurt. Not that we really get sad about it, but we make it important to break off our ties with anyone who hurts our ego. And of course we want to make the world know about it as well. It was the time when the only pain we knew was physical pain. We thought it was the worst thing. Little did we know…

It simply isn’t possible to live like that anymore. If things look simple now, then there’s probably something wrong. If you can’t figure that out then you are still living in your simple world, away from reality, but yet you might be happiest of the lot. You might miss out on the ‘realities’ of life, but heck, you are satisfied!  Probably not worrying about those problems that seemingly sound huge but are quite silly, you worry about your own simple problems, which by the way, you don’t think would destroy your life forever. It is funny how small things can be perceived to be capable of destroying your entire life. As a kid, the biggest of problems was a problem only till our parents thought so. Being a source of the problems ourselves, parents’ scolding was the worst we’d think would happen. Their reassurance meant that there wasn’t any problem at all in the first place. And everything used to be forgotten.  Today we never tell our parents what bugs us. We think the problems are too complicated. It is we who make them complicated. It doesn’t actually matter if the molehill that we made a mountain of was worth so much trouble. As long as it sounds pretty complicated and adhere to the standards of being depressing enough. And even if we want to make things simple, someone is ready to pull you into the mud.

Not that there aren’t any real problematic situations that we can find ourselves in. Complications are there. And we have to deal with them although most of them are not easy to deal with. You see, they are not those simple problems we had as kids. We can’t just run to our parents to scold us and then we can shed those problems off our shoulders. We can’t run from them, neither can we deal with them properly. We want to share them with someone, and talk about it until it completely gets out of the system. And amazingly, it is as if the problem wasn’t there in the first place. We realize that we didn’t exactly want to cry over the problem or try to solve it, we just wanted to be heard. Simply heard. Yet we failed to realize that earlier. Why? Because simple facts simply don’t go down our throats now anymore.

Things really were simple when we were kids…