For those of us who are lucky enough to remember childhood fondly, it seems no surprise that we often become sentimental towards our past. Perhaps it's the childhood innocence that we miss, or our playfulness that knew no bounds, or maybe childhood is just preferable to the mountain of deadlines that loom over us throughout our twenties.
There may be an argument that our twenties are eerily comparable to our childhood, hence our nostalgia always seem to spike at this age. During childhood we’re ultimately clueless; most of our experiences are new and our navigation of the world is essentially down to trial and error. As we grow up, our carers are there to point us in the right direction and by the time our teen years roll around, we’re pretty confident in our own set ways of doing things. Then, the clock turns and our twenties creep in, bringing with them a lot of change. Some of us in our twenties might be living away from home for the first time or navigating personal relationships like never before. Somehow, all of our independence that we worked so hard for in our teenage years has vanished, and we’re left with the same naivety we had as children, hence our desire to look back towards our younger years, when exploration and trying new things didn't seem quite so daunting. We’d all do well to go about life's vicissitudes with some of our childhood resilience.
Somehow, all of our independence that we worked so hard for in our teenage years has vanished, and we’re left with the same naivety we had as children.
Alternatively, childhood was, for many, a time of lesser stress and knowledge of expectations. A favourable symptom of youth is the ignorance to what adulthood really entails. As children, it’s difficult to understand why we can't all marry into royalty or become astronauts, and thus our imagination is sharper than any voice of reason which opposes our optimism. Only experience with reality, which we become far too familiar with as we grow older, can dull our heavy ambitions. So now, as twenty-something year olds, when we’re faced with choosing between one harshly tedious lifestyle or another, it seems almost second nature to reflect upon our childhood passions and wonder if one day, we might have been astronaut princesses, had we followed our little dreams.