Home Grown Truths
I read somewhere once that “you don’t have to own the playground to play on the swings”. I found that a particularly odd-about kind of adage really. Odd but somehow quietly truthful in its matter-of-fact manner. Disarming as well.
I love home grown truths. They have just enough of a ring about the truth they are trying to convey that one somehow feels (and this despite never having met before) a warming familiarity that by-passes anything one might consider a real stranger danger and therefore set any alarm bells off in our sensibilities. No, home truths really can be quite disarming.
As for the adage, I’d interpret it in a completely different way to what you might but here’s the thing for me. It looks and feels inclusive and that my friend is my sole reason for letting my guard down. Strange but true, as indeed most adages can be.
It’s the effect of reading something like that and realising that with so little regard for my personal safety I’m prepared to take something like it at face value. I like the feeling, yes warm and fuzzy that it gives me.
It makes me feel that I can share in something that to all intents and purposes doesn’t belong to me (in the personal sense) but that I’m permitted to use (in the general sense) because someone benevolently allows me too. No small wonder then that warm and fuzzy works.
Maybe it’s the sharing aspect of the adage that touches a soft spot in me. Sharing makes it personal, well the intention to share. I’d say anyone would want to make friends with anyone else wanting to at least spread the love around, wouldn’t you?
Maybe I’m just a soft touch, in any case, however you interpret what’s been written there’s something really lovely about the mind-picture you conjure up in your head about being able to play on swings.
When I was a kid, I played on swings for hours. It was the soaring feeling that I loved the most. And you could see so far away when you swung as high as you could. I’d forgotten about that feeling. Maybe I had my sights on being a high-flyer even back then!
Do I want to be one now? No. I can swing high without feeling the need to be a high flyer these days, my priorities have changed but every once and a while it’s nice to think you can still fly high if you want to even if you choose not to. Smile, you know you’ve grown up when you realise that!
