I don’t think that we ever grow up.

I mean we grow out,

we grow in,

we grow apart . . .  or we grow closer together

We grow fat, we grow thin, we grow strong, we grow weak,

but after a certain age we don’t grow up, in fact we may instead, in the case of my grandma, we may grow a little shorter.

Well I am 27 year old and still not yet six feet tall. Still 27 and unable to do a hand full of jobs because of my not being six feet tall.  I don’t feel wiser or more understanding on a spiritual level, but in the nostalgia I am transported and produces something profound in me more than the new.

La Traviata still reminds me of my first love and feels me with anguish.  In these songs I am raptured back to my youth like dementia ridden elderly retired person listening to a “Sentimental Journey” or “You must have been a beautiful baby.”  We have a sort of cognitive ease and peace when the nostalgia enters back into our lives and we are transported back to our lives in the “growing up” period.  Why do we go back to this period with so much reverence?  Perhaps it was the riskiness of every decision; every decision was dramatic: should I date this person, does this person like me, which University should I go to, or when you first get a breakthrough in your voice lesson; or whatever else you are interested in.  That moment is always the sweetest and as I get older reliving it produces a new kind of joy within me, like an addict’s first hit.

Or even more profoundly upsetting is your first truly mystical experience.  You remember … the one where you are moved to your core and shaken and then afterward you are suddenly and without return instantly “grown up.”  The past becomes sweet nostalgia.  You are left with your now young-lings encouraging them to enjoy the sweetness because they carelessly and blindly to not know how sweet it truly is.  So you tell stories, you shape and mold, you bestow, and hope for their happiness.  You hope that they cease these fleeting moments before they suddenly and without return “grow up.”

Don’t let me say that there is no hope left for the one who has grown up.  I hope desperately that through work or openness or experience that I will propelled or transported into a new nostalgia.  That perhaps it will be like the first kiss, like the first love, like the first voice lesson revelation, like the first time I came to know Jesus.  It is in this space that I must indeed grow young again and indeed see through the eyes of a child.  Trusting that the risks and faith involved will cause me to leap over the chasm into the new nostalgia; that the lover will reciprocate the kiss (that lover you’ve spent a lifetime with can become like new), or the voice jury will be successful, or the opening night intentions of the actors will be understood by the audience.

These hurdles and greater and greater leaps become of the utmost importance! They keep me young again, they keep me growing, and they stop me from “growing up.”