Things that Children teach us…

 

A crisp packet waltzes disjointedly across the grey concrete floor of the railway platform in the wind, with all the grace of a drunken great uncle dancing the Macarena at a boozy Irish christening.  Shards of light cascade briskly through the fast moving clouds and a solitary leaf takes to flight as if falling upwards towards heaven.  Like as if the whole world has been upturned.  I watch it fall upward. 

 

An old man clasps the hand of a young woman waiting to load her case onto the train upon its arrival.  His words to her are soft, gentle and poignant although I cant make them out.   I see his eyes are full of tears, he may not see her again now before he dies.  This may be the last time.  The ensuing storm creates a vacuum in the air mirroring the feeling in his heart.

 

A young teenage boy stays seated glued to his mobile, maybe cyberspace is a safer space nowadays, maybe we all need a little of its sanctuary from the real world.  It can be cold at times in the real world, avatars cant break your heart or die on you I suppose.  Me and Buddy sit between the teenagers and the two family members.  Buddy has the best perspective on this whole platform.  To him trains don’t get you from A to B, they don’t just get you to work or home.  They don’t take people you love away from you never to be seen again.

 

To him a train is an adventure, a day out.  A marvellous, magical and spell binding mystery ride.  The destination unimportant to him.   Then I think maybe I’ve got the best seat on the platform, you see, I know their world but he lets me see into his also.  I see the duality, the yin and the yang.  I see how 4 adults and a little boy can sit at the same platform and it is only the child who holds magic in his heart.  When we as adults bit on the apple of knowledge we where certainly cast out of heaven.  Everything become grey and everything was pre empted by ‘just’.  Just a crisp packet, just concrete, just a train.  But when you see through the eyes of a child, totally in that moment.  It all becomes.  ‘Just magic’   

 

Then life does not merely take on a certain poetry, part of your life becomes a poem.