Notion of Growth

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

Page 11

II
Hermann Kuhn
guided us so playfully through our early years, we restrict exactly the one feature that filled our life with liveliness.
The Beginning
More or less willingly we accept the advice whispered by our environment (school, relatives, friends etc.) that now the seriousness of life would start and that the rest of our days will conform to this - more solemn - pattern of reduced happiness. We learn to put less value on our enthusiasm than on our material and emotional stability - though in the long run any such stability always proves either highly fleeting and built on quicksand, or it solidifies our life into a deathlike state in which nothing is able to move within and outside us.
In all this we follow the overwhelming example of those around us, whom we are hardly able to resist. Lacking any alternative concept, we accept a life that is only occasionally inspired by fascination and enthusiasm, but for the most part grinds us down in an increasingly monotonous and dull routine.
Yet no matter how soothing this supposed stability may appeal to us most of the time, as violently does it tear us apart at other times when we suddenly become aware of how deeply we locked ourselves into these desperate confining boundaries. We sense that this could not possibly have been everything, that life should offer more than increasingly stagnant resignation with less and less real happiness. An almost irrational yearning for breaking loose, for · carefree excitement, for daring adventure rises within us - the yearning for exactly that type of enthusiasm that made us experience our youth so intensely.
If we abhor to continue our life with this inner disappointment, with this deep-rooted unfulfilled longing, then we have to fundamentally change something in our present situation, then we have to find other worlds we can explore