When I was younger my mother decided to pull me out of school before I hit first grade. I never actually understood why, simply because I had felt that I was getting a good education in that tiny little private school I attended. I knew all my colors, I memorized all my alphabet and began reading, and I knew each and every one of the songs and hymns we sang, and all by heart. I loved those old hymns we sang and I would sing them to myself whenever I could or the teacher allowed me, which unfortunately wasn’t very often.
I got yelled at quite a bit back in the day and sat in time-out so many times for singing while I was working. That was why my mother pulled me out. My mother, having been an educator, understood the importance of my singing to my creativity. If I loved to sing and it helped me think, she didn’t want anyone to stop me from singing. She pulled me out to homeschool me and with this new system of education in order I had only one rule: sing whenever my heart needed to sing. I’m in college and I still often hum to myself while I work.
I began realizing how much creativity was important to me when I was younger and how that relates to me now that I’m older. How much of my world was based off my imagination and what I was willing to believe and how much of that effects me now as an aspiring Graphic Designer. I think I started thinking about this a few weeks ago after reading a poem by Thomas Hood called I Remember I Remember. The very last stanza went something like this:
I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.
My heart was saddened by this thought, because in all honesty Heaven still feels that close to me. Why is it that so many people grow up and let go of all that childish creativity? It never ceases to be important.
There certainly is a closeness to something more transcendent when you’re young (some call it other things but I call it God). It’s amazing seeing we view the young as unintelligent, but I ask what kind of mind can imagine so much and solve so many problems like a child’s mind? Recently I found a picture (seen below) on the internet that reenforced my deep fondness toward the imagination of the young. The power children have seems so small and yet it inspires an image as powerful as this. I don’t know about you, but I cried when I saw it. I remembered those days when all it took was a teddy bear to make the monsters disappear. When you’re little and don’t understand life, perhaps your imagination is the only way to make sense of everything that seems harmful or unfair. Now that I’m older, I cherish my inner child a bit more, because it was where I left my hope and it may be the only way to channel that hope back into my own life. I allow my inner child to sneak out once in a while. I allow myself to trust when it’s hard. I believe in the unseen and impossible. Though I’m growing up, and much seems to be changing, I learned everything I know from starting off young…and I’ve made it this far.
jazzymimi 