One of my campers this week looked like she was about to cry as she walked in. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that sometimes she gets scared before she gets to camp. She started to cry a little so I told her how I used to get scared and cry before going to school, but that my mom would talk to a tree to make me feel better, this made her laugh. 

Sitting here now, Worried Blues by Bob Dylan plays on my i-tunes. It hit me that what he is singing about is exactly what this little girl was feeling. And that even though adults are better able to hide their emotions we are often scared. I started to think about what makes adults feel that way. It is no longer summer camp or school so what is it? And do we deal with it differently? If so, how? 

Dylan's song is about leaving a place, someone leaving him, trouble on his mind, going someplace new and finding a place that is suitable. It seems to me that adults are frightened of going where they have never been before, but unlike children who are often going to a location or a camp or school, it is less connected to the physical and more connected to the progress they are making in their own lives. They are afraid to go places that disrupt the identity that has been formed by their actions up to that point, they are afraid to change, to do something different, to grow.

I think about my own life. It has been so full of changes in recently. I definitely am frightened by some of them, have cried sometimes, but in the end have had no choice but to accept them. Children do that as well, you can just usually see the process much more visibly than in an adult. It is true that we never stop growing, never stop becoming and that being scared is a part of this process. Sometimes it takes a six year old to remind me of that.