Resonomia

What We Carry From Childhood Into the People We Become

Growing up is usually described as a process of leaving things behind.

We leave behind rooms, schools, toys, fears, games, summers, voices, and versions of ourselves that once seemed permanent. We learn responsibility. We become more careful. More practical. More guarded.

And yet some part of us does not entirely disappear.

Sometimes it returns through music.

Not necessarily through the songs we heard as children. Sometimes the music arrives much later, when we are already adults, and somehow reaches the part of us that can still dream without embarrassment, feel without calculation, rebel against what seems wrong, or stand in wonder before something larger than ourselves.

Perhaps that is what the child within us really is.

Not immaturity.

Not nostalgia.

But a capacity we spend much of adulthood trying not to lose.

Queensrÿche’s “Silent Lucidity” has always seemed to belong to that space between waking and dreaming. There is something almost protective in it, as though imagination itself could become a room we enter when the outside world becomes too loud.

Children understand that instinctively.

They cross into imagined worlds without apologizing for them. A room can become a kingdom. Darkness can contain monsters or stars. A song can become an entire landscape.

Adults are taught to become suspicious of that kind of surrender.

We learn to distinguish sharply between what is useful and what is fanciful, what is real and what is imagined. But perhaps imagination was never something we were supposed to outgrow. Perhaps it is one of the ways we continue to make sense of a world that does not always make sense on its own.

Godsmack’s “Serenity” reaches another part of that same inner territory.

Its quiet feels different from innocence. It is the quiet we begin searching for after life has already become complicated.

There are moments when adulthood seems to consist largely of noise: obligations, arguments, deadlines, expectations, information, decisions. Eventually we may discover that peace is not something automatically given to us. We have to find our way back to it.

And perhaps the child within us remembers how.

Not because childhood was always peaceful. For many people, it was not.

But because there was once a self that could still become absorbed completely in a sound, a patch of sunlight, water, a story, a tree moving in the wind, or the strange pleasure of simply being somewhere without needing the moment to accomplish anything.

That ability to be fully present may be one of the first things adulthood teaches us to neglect.

Other music reminds us that growing up can also mean learning to resist.

Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” has long carried an image of childhood confronting an institution determined to make everyone fit the same shape.

Its power is larger than rebellion against a classroom.

It asks what happens when systems stop seeing children as individuals.

Children arrive already different from one another—curious in different ways, talented in different directions, restless or quiet, easy or difficult to understand. Institutions often find difference inconvenient. But perhaps adulthood asks us to remember what it felt like to stand on the other side of authority.

The child within us may be the part that still resists becoming merely another brick.

Deep Purple’s “Child in Time” takes that vulnerability somewhere darker.

There is something devastating about the idea of a child looking at the violence of the adult world.

War, cruelty, fear, hatred—these are things adults learn to explain. We give them histories, strategies, ideologies, causes.

A child may simply see that people are hurting one another.

Perhaps moral sensitivity begins there.

Maybe the child within us is also the part that has never completely learned to accept brutality as normal.

Because one of adulthood’s dangers is not only that we might become cruel ourselves, but that we become accustomed to cruelty. We become sophisticated enough to explain what once would simply have horrified us.

There may be wisdom in refusing to become entirely sophisticated about suffering.

Then, at some point, the perspective changes.

We are no longer only remembering the child we once were.

We become responsible for another one.

Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open” captures something extraordinary about that transition: the moment when the future suddenly has a face.

There is hope in it, but also fear.

What kind of world will this child inherit?

What will I teach?

What will I repeat?

What will I do differently?

That is one of adulthood’s deepest confrontations with childhood. We discover that the child within us is not merely something to preserve. It may also influence what kind of adult we become for somebody else.

And that is where the subject becomes more difficult.

Because childhood is not always protected.

Pat Benatar’s “Hell Is for Children” refuses the comforting idea that childhood is automatically a safe place. It forces the listener toward something we would rather not imagine: children learning fear from the very adults who should have given them security.

Perhaps this is also why I have never been comfortable with the easy phrase that childhood is the happiest time of our lives.

There is nothing sentimental about preserving the child within us when we remember that.

It can also mean preserving our refusal to look away.

The adult world sometimes asks children to carry things they should never have been asked to carry. And one of the responsibilities of adulthood must be to recognize that vulnerability rather than romanticize childhood from a safe distance.

Metallica’s “Dyers Eve” approaches wounded childhood from another direction: the grown child looking backward with anger.

The voice is no longer helpless.

It can finally accuse.

There is something important in that too. We often speak about childhood as though adulthood automatically resolves it. But years passing do not necessarily erase what happened early in life. Sometimes adulthood simply gives us new words for things we could not name when they were happening.

Perhaps that is why certain songs reach people with such force.

They give language to the part of us that remembers.

And still, the story cannot end there.

Because growing older is not only about what we preserve from childhood or what childhood left behind.

It is also about time.

Five for Fighting’s “100 Years” moves through life almost as though all its ages are somehow present at once. Childhood, youth, adulthood, old age—they seem less like separate countries than rooms connected by the same hallway.

We tend to imagine ourselves as the age we are now.

But are we ever only that age?

Somewhere inside the adult may still be the fifteen-year-old who thought everything was beginning. The child who believed certain things would last forever. The younger self who had not yet learned what would be lost.

And perhaps the older self is already there too, reminding us that time is not waiting.

That does not make childhood something we should cling to.

It makes it something we should carry wisely.

Which may be why Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” feels like the right place to arrive.

Growing up is not staying where we began.

It is movement.

We learn, fail, change, leave, return, adapt. We become people our younger selves could never have fully imagined.

But perhaps maturity does not require us to abandon everything they knew.

We can keep the curiosity.

The imagination.

The capacity for wonder.

The instinct to recoil from cruelty.

The courage to resist becoming exactly what others expect.

The tenderness that remembers what children need.

The ability to disappear for a moment into music and emerge somehow more ourselves.

Maybe the child within us was never asking us to remain young.

Maybe it was only asking not to be forgotten.

And perhaps growing older, at its best, is simply learning how to carry that voice with us while we are still learning to fly.

The Music That Keeps the Child Within Us Alive –  A Personal Reflection

RESONOMIA | Music • Media • Culture • Relevance

Exploring the voices, ideas and stories that continue to resonate long after the moment has passed.

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