Finding the Child You Once Were

What if the key to your future was buried in your past? This piece is a meditation on childhood innocence, emotional authenticity, and the quiet work of inner freedom. If you've ever felt trapped by who you've become — this is for you.

A little boy, in his yard, opens his mouth to taste the falling snow.

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Finding the Child You Once Were

What if the key to your future was buried in your past? This piece is a meditation on childhood innocence, emotional authenticity, and the quiet work of inner freedom. If you've ever felt trapped by who you've become — this is for you.

Do you remember the child you used to be? Before memories, dreams of the future, and the desperate need to please — to become whoever they wanted you to be? Back then, you weren't yet the main character of your own story. Do you remember the world, when you looked at it through a child's eyes?

How the poplar trees shot up toward the sky, nearly brushing the clouds, how the golden sunlight made their leaves dance and cracked your eyes wide open — forever.

You blew on dandelions just to watch them drift down slowly, like paratroopers landing in the jungle of the grass, in the meadows where you spent your days, under the summer sun.

Can your heart still smell tangerines when Christmas made its glass ornaments shine? Can you still feel the cold on the tip of your nose, numbing the warmth of the classroom, your footsteps crunching on the white of winter — as if you were the first person on earth?

When you were happy, you leaped around like a young goat, and when sadness came, tears rolled down your cheeks without you even trying to hold them back. Your feelings didn't yet know the brake of self-image. You lived them raw, unmasked, and time stood still — the seasons came and went without it moving an inch.

Do you remember how your chest swelled with the air it breathed, and how that air felt inside you like a sorbet melting in your mouth on a scorching summer day? Your memories back then were nothing more than a vague, bittersweet sadness softening the blazing joy of the present moment.

Then the years went by without asking your permission.

Time, that tireless walker, pulls you forward, keeping you from lingering at the bend of any given moment, and today you are building the very walls that tomorrow will lock you in.

Your memories have become so many wounds that still bruise the child you were — and you can no longer hear his sobs, because big kids don't cry, and crying, let's be honest, gets you nowhere. So what's the point?

You've locked yourself inside an armor you can no longer escape, and yet you dread the wounds still to come — wounds that might tear open the ones from the past, barely healed.

And yet, the child you were is still here, today.

He's there every time a tree stops your thoughts in their tracks,

every time a ray of sunlight cuts through the silence,

every time a forgotten smell opens a door without warning,

every time a bird's song makes you look up for no reason at all.

He's there whenever, just for a moment,

you stop narrating your life and simply live it.

All it would take, for him to step out of memory, is for you to wake up to the present — unburdened by the past — and find again that honesty you once had, with no calculations, no holding back.

The spiritual path holds the key to the armor that binds you. But you are the only one who can turn that lock — and set yourself free from fixed ideas, fear, the weight of the past, and the anxiety of the future, to belong, at last, only to this moment, in full freedom.

Free the child you used to be.

If you have any questions, please write here:

madhyama.marga@gmail.com

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