Now I’m going to ask you something of you dear readers, and I want a nice honest show of hands. Okay? Right. Good. Put your hand right up, and I mean right up, no slacking alright- put your hand up if you have ever in the past couple of years wished your life was as carefree as it was back in primary school. Come on, don’t be shy, that’s it. YOU THERE. IN THE BACK. PUT THAT HAND RIGHT UP. There we go, you see, that’s basically all of you. (Well if’s all of you in my imaginary blogging lecture theatre (which I’ve named the blogture theatre incidentally) but the point still stands.)
You see, we all, at some point, just want to return to that world of freedom and joy, where everything was a game and nothing was out of bounds. When you’re little the sofa isn’t just a sofa and the floor isn’t just a floor. Oh no. The floor is lava and the sofa is you’re only protection, a rock in the middle of this sea of death which you must cling to for dear life or fall to your lava-ry demise. Ahhh, being little was a wonderful time. It’s no surprise that so many of us aging teens wish to return. And, here’s the thing, why don’t we? What’s stopping us throwing off the shackles of teenagedom and returning to the rainbow coloured ball pit of childhood? I say why not grow up and be young? Why don’t we maintain this element of childish fun and get to drive and be independent and drink and all that jazz? I say let’s be childish grown ups.
It’s one of the problems of life however that, in the process of growing up, we’re forced to, well, grow up. Already I see those friends I once muck about with so wonderfully leave behind their childish ways to become an adult *shudders*. Oh the disdain in which I hold that word. Because there’s a certain stigma attached to that word ‘adult’ now which we simply cannot avoid. To become an adult is not to become a person secure with their personality and their own self. Nope. To become an adult in our current society is to become a person who is responsible and sensible and various other words ending in “ible”. There’s no sense of fun, no childish mucking about, if an person of maturer age acts like a child in anyway they are told that its “not adult”. But I have long since come to the conclusion that the only way to live is to maintain an element of stupid fun.
Next time you’re stressed readers, next time you’re feeling a bit down or the coursework’s just got a tad too much then remember this and act on it. There is never anything better for stress than good old fashioned mucking about. Let me give you an example from the riveting life of Oscar Owen. I deal with a helluva lot of stress, it’s just a fact of my life I’ve come to live with. Most of this stress I create for myself, because I am a confessed worrier but there’s also stress from the incredibly mountain of work which comes from maintaining 4 A Levels into A2 Year, something I’m already feeling and we’ve barely started; there’s stress from my pitiless excuse of a love life in which everything’s ended in lots of tears and Woody Allen marathons to remind myself that true love is somewhere out there; there’s stress from my eating habits, my constant feeling of “oh fuck I’m going to die there’s a tumor in my head”, my poor sleeping pattern and, most of all, my panic over the state of my favourite fictional characters (note from Floraidh: he's not joking). And how do I deal with this stress? Well, most recently, I volunteered to put on some silly glasses, wave a wand about and advertise our college’s Harry Potter Appreciation Society. It was a day of nothing but childish playtime, I put on a costume and drew some silly pictures. Blessed relief amongst a sea of stress.
As that old northern genius Alan Bennett writes in his coming of age masterpiece The History Boys, the only antidote to growing up is “sheer calculated silliness” and I present the same idea to you reader. The next time you’re stressed or full of the woes of life or just feel like you’re coming dangerously close to becoming an adult *shudders once more* then please, I beg of you readers, take my advice and go be silly. Go put on a silly costume or talk in a silly voice or play with lego or just run around for no apparent reason. Anything will do and anything will make you feel better. Sometimes, when the future seems scary, the only thing to do is revert to the past.
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