subject: Where Did All that Childhood Energy Go? - The Little Prince Series [print this page] Do you ever look at little children at playhopping, skipping, jumping, runningand wonder what happened to all that energy you once had?
I have pretty decent energy these days, but for many years I found myself tired and dragging myself through the day.
I used to wonder what happened to my boundless childhood energy and enthusiasm.
Well, I found out. The answer is in the story of The Little Prince.
As a child, whenever I got excited about something, it seemed like someone wanted to thwart my will at every turn.
Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teacherseveryone majored incontrol, constantly turning minor issues into a "big deal," stopping me in my tracks, making me feel guilty, curtailing my excitement for life.
These adults had long ago given up on having fun in life, confining themselves to the dull mediocrity of the mundane workaday world.
No wonder they repeatedly found themselves disturbed by any display of the joyful excitement of a young boy full of enthusiasm and the desire to explore his world.
By age six, the young boy at the heart of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's story of The Little Prince, who had a talent for drawing, was in a similar pickle as myself, represented by the way he restricts himself to drawing boa constrictors.
First he draws a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant as seen from the outside and calls it his Drawing Number One. It's symbolic of how his entire existence has become constricted by the adults around whom he grows up.
When the adults can't understand this first drawing and think it's a hat, seeking to be understood he tries again.
This time he draws the boa constrictor digesting an elephant as seen from theinside.
This he calls his Drawing Number Two. It too is archetypal of his lifethe flip side of the coin of his Drawing Number One.
Boa constrictors from the outside or the inside are theonly pictures he now draws.
Drawing Number Two symbolizes the way the little boy hasinternalized the constriction he experiences in his world. Though at first we resent the way family and society thwart our will, before long we learn to toe the line.
But conforming doesn't make us happy; it just gets us by without getting into so much trouble from adults.
With our spontaneity constricted, we actually become angrythough many of us learn to hold it in, so we may notseem angry.
Our anger may take a frozen form, sapping the joy out of our life. We become listless, tired, sad much of the time, even depressed.
We certainly aren't full of life, exuberant with the natural enthusiasm of a child anymore.
In my case, when I started getting into serious relationships in my early twenties I found myself becoming enraged over the smallest things. Anything that in the least way smacked of someone thwarting my will became a trigger for anger.
On one level I found myself shut down, unable to feel deeply and connect meaningfully. On another level I was a coiled spring, ready to pop at any time.
It was years before I realized the connection between my angermy utter resistance to controland a childhood that had done a thorough boa-constrictor job on me.
What about in your own life? How did the boa constrictor affect you, and how have you journeyed on since then? Perhaps some of us could share our insights, start a discussion that will be helpful to many others.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's use of the archetypal Drawing Number One and Drawing Number Two is clearly intended to convey that the way we internalize our constricting external world isuniversal.
Or as St. Paul put it, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." In modern language, he's saying: "All of us have been undermined by the way in which society has infected us with its low view of our humanity, to the point we no longer show up as the magnificent beings, in the divine likeness, that we really are."
Where Did All that Childhood Energy Go? - The Little Prince Series
