Being free again

I was thinking of childhood friendships that had no inhibitions. We walked together hands around each other's shoulders, laughed together in the sun, and shared everything in comradeship whose roots went deep.

It makes me wonder what happens when we grow up. 

Young, free and happy. What happens when we grow up?

Suddenly the distinctions of race and class emerge from the shadows and dictate how we live and who to welcome into our lives. We stop walking together, laughing together and crying together freely as we did when we were young. We build walls around us and retreat in shells like tortoises only emerging inch by inch; growing more suspicious of one another even when there's nothing to be suspicious about. 

We hoard so much when a neighbour is naked and starving, we employ the unqualified haves at the expense of the qualified have-nots. The poor are ostracized from their little plots of land so the rich can build more mega factories. There's no longer dwelling together in love as a people who all have blood flowing through their veins and who all live to die some day. 

The "poet of enslaved humanity" Pablo Neruda said "things keep on happening" and maybe what he called the "rubble that darkens the stones" and "the blackness of nighttime" has  followed us into daytime and settled in our souls otherwise what would compel us to live so selfishly and insensitively like monsters in a jungle.

In one of his literary masterpieces, Joseph Conrad talks about "a land without memories; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the night, where each sunrise like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow." To me this is the land of heartlessness with humans turning against fellow humans like wolves that devour each other.

Yet we are called human beings because we have a heart, a conscience to distinguish good from evil, and a will with which we can rise to the greatness of character that makes us live and love like we were created to live and love.