Ever since Thing had been
left to fend for himself, he had grown a little harder to life. I suppose that
life is a matter of holding on to your innocence until gravity eventually
catches up with you and then, it’s all a matter of how you deal with that.
From the outside, Thing was
still the same beautiful soul that he had always been. The change was in the
little things - like in his singing. Once, he would burst forth with a song to
make himself happy and without him realising it, he also made those within
earshot smile, too. But there had been too many times when there was laughter
and sniggering at this signing by those at school, and so he became a little
more self-conscious about his tunefulness.
Gravity hits us all in the
end and hopefully most of us have someone there to help us through it all. The
problem with Thing was that since his mother had gone off to a place that Thing
was sure she would return from, he had to deal with all the harder problems of
life himself. And that can be a
dangerous way to live.
Rules that are made to keep
you safe, can inevitably keep people out.
He remembered what
Grandfather Thing had told him “A heart builds walls to protect a heart, but in
the end you build a jail for yourself, and in building that jail all the bad
stuff is trapped inside with you”.
One day Thing went to
school, as he always did, but lately he had started to stop singing when he got
to the bottom of the mountain, so as not to attract attention. He would walk
very quietly to the school doors and sit at the side of the classroom – in
order that he would neither upset nor disturb anyone.
But there are two things
wrong with that thinking (as his mother would have told him had she been
there). The first is that there are some people in this world who are so
unhappy within themselves, that they hurt people who are making a noise, just
as easily as they hurt those who are quiet.
It is as if they were
saying: ‘I am unhappy then I want you to be unhappy too’. The other point was that
if Thing had bothered to talk to the children in the classroom, he would have
found that there were people who wanted to talk to him too. One girl thought
Thing was the coolest kid in class but as he’d never got around to speaking to her, he hadn’t
found that out. Another kid at the front of the class wanted to know what kind
of stuff he did for hobbies but was too shy to talk to Thing.
You see Thing keeping quiet - (and instead of him thinking that it meant 'I don’t want to upset any of you') - ended up being seen as ‘Thing didn’t want
to mix with any of us because he thinks he’s too good for us’.
In this life, you can’t
second-guess anyone’s thoughts, and you can’t walk about protecting yourself
from Gravity – because as sure as there is a sun in the sky, one day Gravity is
gonna hunt you down and get you. And that’s when you want as many hearts on
your side as possible. So Thing was making his life a little harder than it
needed to be, by keeping himself to himself.
Yet sooner rather than
later, Thing would find out that by breaking down the walls and being
yourself would upset some people (because some people are walking
different paths, that’s all) but the rest, the ones who saw the beauty in who
you were, well, these were the ones worth holding on to.
And on that sunny day when Thing
worked all this out in his heart and his head, was the day he started to sing
again and not worry who could hear: because being yourself catches the hearts that matter.
He knew that when his mother returned, she would
be proud of all these thoughts and the lessons he had learned.
Thing was
growing up and he liked the feeling.
bobby stevenson 2013
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