THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH:  FOR KIDS ONLY    

      Grownups are the foolish ones.  It's the children who are wise.  As we grow into adulthood and supposedly learn more and more, we really are closing ourselves off from all we once "knew" and so, allow our minds to accept less and less.  A young child's sense of wonder and curiosity embraces any and all possibles with no high and mighty ego getting in the way.  The fresh, un-indoctrinated brain is simply switched "on" and receptive to whatever comes along.  Entrants don't have to pass any "Is it proven?" test such as us big people put on guard to protect us from things we're afraid to face.

      Instead of desperately searching for ways to regain the young bodies we once had, we should be doing all we can to regain the freedom of our brains that we made ourselves grow out of.  Kids don't have to have anyone else's approval to know what they know "is."  They trust their own senses, as humans were designed to do.  That's why we have them, for goodness sake!  If a child sees, hears, smells, feels, or tastes something, then it is something.  Others don't have to validate it for it to be believed.  Things don't all need explanations either, since youngsters are wise enough to know they don't know everything and so, don't have to.

      We're so stupid in our grownup mode that we must look to each other & find an "OK" in someone-or-other's formula or code or rulebook before we'll believe what's right in front of our faces.  And, if there's no pre-approved in-full-detail manual on it, we won't believe whatever our senses tell us is real.  "Real" is something else we have a serious problem with, the moment we leave childhood behind.  Ask any little one how she knows a thing is real & you'll get "I just know!" back, with a pout aimed at you for being silly enough to ask.

      Try the same thing with fellow mature persons, and all hell breaks loose!  Dogma, philosophy, scientific mumbo-jumbo or what-have-you, the answer, you'll finally find, is more like they don't really know.  They scramble about trying to sound so knowing, because after all, "We are worldly, educated, civilized, intelligent people, dammit!"  But they've really forgotten all they ever knew about "knowing." 

Once past puberty, everyone becomes a disbeliever.  Disbelieving oneself & believing only what others will admit to.  All of us, infidels!  Infidels with a vengeance.  Willing to go to any lengths to disprove what that tiny bit of child-sense still left in there is trying in vain to get us to notice.  So afraid of "not knowing" all, that all we do know becomes suspect.  So terrified of finding out we don't control a single thing in life or in our world, that we have to put leashes on everything in sight.  Least of all, can we let our minds run free!  What if we had to face that worst of all things, "not knowing"?  What would we do then?  Imagine how helplessly we'd flounder around if we dropped all those tethers to our fanciful, wishful "explanations" of everything.

      That's where our young'uns have it all over us.  They are born knowing they control nothing.  They sure don't have any say about how they get out of mommy's nice, warm, safe belly and get plopped smack into the middle of our cold, cruel, adult-run world, do they?  So the first thing they learn from experience is that they don't know anything and can't do a damn thing about it, anyhow.   Pretty good for openers.  Senses kick in right away and feel's in the lead, with taste a close second, as mother's milk & how quick it can be gotten to is the first order of the kid's first day.  Hearing is happy with just a heartbeat close by and smell quickly picks up the outside scent of the body it knew from the inside, from way back since it knew anything at all.  Funny, isn't it, how sight is the very last of our five physical senses to be activated.  Or is it?  Maybe that's the key to youth's great knack for "knowing" what is & what isn't.  A blind person's other senses sharpen to an awesome accuracy, as must each baby's, while sightless for all those months, in its growing chamber.

      Being born suddenly, and gradually coming to use that new sense, sight, the child's other abilities' reliability isn't just discounted and ignored, either.  Maybe, unlike adults, children still don't have to rely so heavily on seeing for believing, as we do.  Perhaps, as well, that elusive 6th sense remains intact.  The one that enables infants as yet unborn to experience what goes on in the world just outside.  There are too many well-documented cases of pre-birth memory of events mothers recalled, but never mentioned out loud, for such not to be true.  Emotions and other rather less-than-tangible goings-on are picked up by the gestating mind-- to be "recalled" at a much later time.  Therefore, some additional natural sense of some sort must be in operation.

      To be able to recapture all that essence of youth that we lost as we grew up, would be to truly find the long-sought fountain that eluded Ponce de Leon and eludes us death and age-fearing, old-growing folk still.  To regain that free-seeing trust in our own "knowing" is a treasure worth hunting.  The wonderful-- and awful-- thing is, it's so easy to find.  Good news:  It's right there inside each of us.  It never left.  Bad news:  We left it.  We "learned" ourselves away from it.  And we're too afraid to just reach down, "know" it's there, and start it going again.  What dummies!  The few ever-young among us who're clever enough to not mind or fear the un"known" are doomed to continue being considered nut cases or wacky New Agers or worse, whenever they notice or experience anything at all that the "smarter" full-fledged adults around them can't explain.  That's the curse of mankind's ego and nothing more.  My advice to all of you is-- trust your own senses.  All six of them.  If any or all of them tell you something "is" even if it's something you fear or want not to believe, ignore the books and the experts and go ahead and just "know" it.

      Do that with everything in your life and you'll never have to yearn for the fun and wonder of lost childhood.  You'll have it with you always.  You'll discover how much you've done yourself out of by growing up in the society-prescribed manner.  It's almost possible to believe that someone, sometime, didn't want us to know very much about certain things and so came up with the brilliant idea of convincing us we have to "grow up."  Well, conspiracy or not, it worked.  On most of us.  Thank goodness there are still a few holdouts.  Otherwise it would be nothing but the blind leading the blind.  It's close enough to that as it is.  Too close for comfort.  And you can see where it's gotten us, if you've guts enough to really take a good look around.  Not a pretty sight.  Had we let kids run the world for the last few centuries, can anyone say it would be any worse?  Anyone but me honest enough to agree it would be a damn sight better?

      Kids of the world, unite!  Take over the place, why don't you?  Pre-pubescent ones, that is.  Teens are already on the adult side of disbelieving-ness, which is why they're so messed up, poor things.  You see, they probably have just enough child-knowing left to know grownups are full of you-know-what, but they want to be them so bad, they have to ignore it and be sense-less, too.  Too bad the littlest ones can't just take over.  What a pretty, fun-filled world of laughter this could be then.  Instead of...      

      Well, you can try hard as you like not to, but that's something you really do "know" isn't it?