When you're small and you sit at the top of the monkey bars, you're not afraid. It's only when you're older that you realise you could fall and break your arm or your leg, that you'd be in plaster for weeks -- miss school or work -- itch constantly and find opening a carton of juice impossible.
When you're small you just enjoy the moment, see the sky as being that bit closer, embrace the experience for what it is and then you climb down. No regrets.
The same is true for belief, she muses, when you're small whatever your mother and father tell you is true. You don't second guess, or analyse, it is what it is and you take everything at face value.
When you get older it gets a lot more difficult to do that because you just know too much about the world. If someone introduces themselves to you as God and spouts off detailed secrets about you it's difficult not to think they must be a sociopath.
If you were three you would simply wave back and say "hi", but now that you're sixteen you have to be indignant. As a teenager the stereotypes tell you to question authority, and what greater authority is there than God?
So you do, and somewhere along the line you forget that you're not supposed to believe all this. And you just appreciate it -- in your own way -- for what it is.
Of course that only makes you feel all the more foolish when you realise that not only were you falling for the lie, you were also wrong about the sociopath theory. Lyme disease induced hallucinations was next on your list of guesses though.
And the whole thing makes you analyse and worry and debate, things that you didn't do so much of when you just accepted. Of course it's easier to accept a path is someone else is there with you, you don't have to worry as much. But all alone in a hospital bed you realise that you no longer -- not that you ever did -- have someone to show you the way.
And as you fall you think about the broken limbs and endless itch that's to come. And while you lie -- alone in the world -- you begin to re-learn how to be afraid.
When you're small you just enjoy the moment, see the sky as being that bit closer, embrace the experience for what it is and then you climb down. No regrets.
The same is true for belief, she muses, when you're small whatever your mother and father tell you is true. You don't second guess, or analyse, it is what it is and you take everything at face value.
When you get older it gets a lot more difficult to do that because you just know too much about the world. If someone introduces themselves to you as God and spouts off detailed secrets about you it's difficult not to think they must be a sociopath.
If you were three you would simply wave back and say "hi", but now that you're sixteen you have to be indignant. As a teenager the stereotypes tell you to question authority, and what greater authority is there than God?
So you do, and somewhere along the line you forget that you're not supposed to believe all this. And you just appreciate it -- in your own way -- for what it is.
Of course that only makes you feel all the more foolish when you realise that not only were you falling for the lie, you were also wrong about the sociopath theory. Lyme disease induced hallucinations was next on your list of guesses though.
And the whole thing makes you analyse and worry and debate, things that you didn't do so much of when you just accepted. Of course it's easier to accept a path is someone else is there with you, you don't have to worry as much. But all alone in a hospital bed you realise that you no longer -- not that you ever did -- have someone to show you the way.
And as you fall you think about the broken limbs and endless itch that's to come. And while you lie -- alone in the world -- you begin to re-learn how to be afraid.
