Earlier this week, I was talking to a client who was confused about a particular feeling he sometimes experiences. “Sometimes, inside, I still feel like a kid. I suspect it’s just that I’m immature.”
My client isn’t immature, and I had a slightly different take on the source of his feeling like a kid. I suggested to him that his feeling was not a sign of immaturity, but instead was a signal that he could still feel the sheer aliveness that animated him.
In most adults, that feeling of sheer aliveness has faded or has been veiled by lots of ideas about how we “should” be at a certain age.
What a huge mistake to lose sight of our aliveness, the very thing that powers our lives. And what a mistake to think that losing sight of it is a sign of maturity. Does it make sense that feeling dead inside could be a sign of having grown up?
When I moved to New York City many years ago (I was in my mid-twenties) one of the things I noticed was how many people I saw seemed to have dead eyes, that seemed to have no life coming out of them. I remember promising myself that I would not become an old person living in New York. Lots of the people who looked this way to me weren’t old, they just looked that way because of their lifeless expressions.
I suspect they didn’t know that the aliveness that animates us when we’re kids doesn’t fade as we age; we just think ourselves away from it. By believing thoughts we have that seem to tell us we’re not allowed to feel so alive anymore, the feelings of aliveness we had in childhood are lost to us.
What do we get in return for believing we shouldn’t feel quite so alive? Exactly what you’d expect; we get a dead feeling inside. Not much of a trade-off, is it?
I suspect the people looking through what seemed to me to be dead eyes probably didn’t allow themselves to feel much of anything.
The entire experience of life each of us has come from what we’ve felt, not from what we’ve thought, so by cutting ourselves off from our feelings, we’re cutting ourselves off from the experience of our own lovely lives.
The alternative to that? If you knew that not letting yourself feel fully alive was a result of not letting yourself feel much of anything, would you continue doing it? Let yourself feel all of it, pleasant and unpleasant alike. By letting yourself feel your own life, feeling like a kid again becomes a likelihood.
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