31 Days - 7 things I learned from being a kid.

Seven things I learned from being a kid. Hmmm...This one is kind of hard! Let me think for a bit...

1. The world of imagination actually exists.  Can you remember engaging in imaginative play and you were so immersed in it that your imaginary world actually existed? I do. I remember stacking up some wooden boxes, covering them in Hessian sacks, getting some rope and tying them to a part of the boxes and all of a sudden I had a horse. I remember wildly riding that horse through desert plains on a remote island somewhere. I saw the island. I saw the remoteness. I felt wild and free and alive. I felt my horse beneath me. That world existed.

I see that world in movie form. I read about that world through Tolkien,  JK Rowling, CS Lewis. I know the worlds that those authors created actually do exist because I've been there. I've seen them.

2. Family is everything. My brothers and sisters and I would fight and argue as kids but when the chips were down we'd all come to each others defence in an instant.

3. You don't need money to have a fantastic time. My best childhood memories involve sausages in bread with sauce cooked on an open fire at the bottom of a sand dune and then spending hours rolling down the sand dune and walking along the beach together. Simple pleasures have always been close to my heart.

4. Strangers are potentially friends I haven't met. I guess moving towns and starting new schools a few times taught me this one.

5. Cyclone Tracy ripped through Darwin on Christmas Day 1974. It was the first time I was really aware that there were forces bigger than those i knew of in my own little world. I learned that the word "Christmas" means nothing to Mother Nature.

6. The value of ingenuity. Our family didn't have much money. My brothers and I didn't get lollies handed to us whenever we wanted them, but we knew that if we found soft drink bottles we could take them down to the local Milk Bar and trade them in for 20c.....or 20c worth of mixed lollies. Usually we went for lollies! When we were a little older we also used to collect aluminum cans and cash them in. We would also deliver pamphlets and advertising material to earn money. I guess we learned that you needed to work for reward.

7.  I guess I also learned about faith.  It was a simple faith, one that was quietly assured of the existence of God and the acceptance that I was loved. That love gently surrounded me every day. I felt it in the sunshine, on the breeze, in my parents consistency and presence.  I don't remember when it became complicated, but somewhere, the memory of that gentle, quiet faith sustains me and holds me secure.