Anyone who has visited their childhood home, their old school, or playing ground, must have noticed how those beds, those desks, those swings look so tiny.
“I can’t believe how small these cornices are! I used to hang myself upside-down from them!” I exclaimed when visiting my first classroom at school. My favorite thing in school, second only to being ready for every one of teachers’ question, was hanging by my feet from the cornice that stuck out from the wall. Now visiting the same room as a grown up, the classroom looked tiny and the cornice was barely up to my knees. “How could I ever manage to hang from that?” I wondered.
The things from one’s childhood seeming small is not a phenomenon. Everyone experiences it. But I recently realized that it has several layers to it, including a very philosophical layer and a big life lesson.
Now that people of our parents’ generation are using social media increasingly more, I have contact once again to some people whom I last saw 10-20 years ago. Some are my school teachers, some distant relatives and old family acquaintances. It was a pleasure to connect with them, especially the ones whom I admired growing up. I looked up to them because of their intellect, their cheerful outlook of the world, and most importantly because they treated me with respect. Sadness came over me though when I talked to these individuals after all those years now and realized that they don’t seem all that admirable to me. “Have they degraded since then? Or is it me who has changed?” I asked myself. The answer, it seems, is “both”.
In the intervening years, I have moved away from my small town of a narrow mentality, graduated from a prestigious university, and then moved away from the country altogether. All the while, the abovementioned individuals remained where they were. And while I believe that they didn’t retrograde in their thinking, from my (more global) perspective, it might seem like they have. For example, there is this school teacher who zealously supported girls’ education and motivated me to reach great heights in education. Now when I talked to him after all these years, his first question was not about my education or career but why I wasn’t married yet. (To give him the benefit of the doubt though, by Indian standards, I am alarmingly late for marriage!)
In the end, it’s not just some objects from one’s childhood like bed, cupboards, or swings that seem smaller, physically, the people do too, metaphorically. Objects do because one has actually physically gotten taller and the people because of the growth in mental and social stature, if at all.