A Taste of Home

The world was always so much simpler when we were young, though of course we didn't know it at the time. There was a whole lifetime to look forward to, you had no responsibilities, everything was safe and secure. For most people, feelings of "youth" go hand-in-hand with feelings of "home". It comes as no surprise to me that whenever I have dreams that take place at home, they occur in the house I grew up in, not the house I'm in now. I don't know if everybody is like that. I'd wager that many people are.

And the only great, true tragedy in our lives is that we must inevitably lose our youth, our passions, our potentials, our freedom, when we grow up, and what is so sad is that when we were young we never knew or appreciated any of it. A child's mind is something so beautiful and unique, but when it is hardened by experience and outside stimuli, it erodes into adulthood. The dandelion blossom falls away and all that is left is grey seeds. Very few people can understand what being young is like, even though they all understood it once.

Consider those thoughts, and go back and listen to "Brain Damage" at the end of Dark Side of the Moon. The band you're in starts playing different tunes.

Every so often an adult can still grasp the mind of a child, and these few souls can often be found in the annals of our most revered artists. One such person spoke to me for ten years during my own youth, and it was a sad, sad day when he stopped speaking. Starting today his wisdom is being rebroadcast in the medium which made it famous, the newspaper, and this morning I found it exactly where I had left it, covering half of the front page of the comics section, right where it deserves to be. A glimpse of his youth, and a taste of mine.