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But during that last week, I want to be seven again. I want my innocence back. You know all that jazz people say? If I knew then what I know now? Forget all of that. I don’t want to know anything when that time comes.

I don’t think most of us recognize the subtleties that came with our childhood. Generally, when our generation starts feeling nostalgic, we start turning back the clocks to some of the more generic memories — the most obvious fascinations. Guts. Global Guts. The whole Nickelodeon scene. Saved by the Bell. Family Matters. Things each of us understand, because there’s a level of companionship in those programs because all of us get it.

That being said, there’s nothing really of substance in thinking of things like that because it takes you to a time that was never significant to the individual. I’m all for reminiscing. In fact, I think we’d discover some of the purest things about ourselves if we started looking under the right rocks. Nostalgia doesn’t grow from the things that everybody understood. Those things are well documented. They’re already cataloged in our brains. We haven’t forgotten them, and because of that, the memories have grown with us and they’re tainted by the people we’ve become.

If you want to really touch on your past, on the things that made you the child you were, you have to dig deeper. You also have to get lucky, because unfortunately, you need to search for the things in our past that we’ve already forgotten. It’s very difficult to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for, but that’s the only way we can understand ourselves in that sense. We need to discover the things that haven’t been trivialized by our sense of humor — by our understanding. When that happens, you’re immediately brought back to those early years when things were so different.

I’m not being clear, and after having thought about this a lot I realize I can’t be. One: I’m not a good enough articulator. Two: A lot of people just can’t understand what I’m talking about. When I was really young, my father used to refer to me as Mr. Memory. I had a knack for remembering all of the details of “life.” — even the inconsequential ones. It wasn’t just because I admired my life and my family so much, but it just was the nature of who I was as a child. I was an observer. I recorded things meticulously without the help of a diary of any sort. I don’t know why I was like this, and the truth of the matter is it probably was a detriment to me on many occasions. It still is to this day.

I hold people to things that don’t really matter, and I judge them on a scale they’re not even aware of. The very moment I meet someone, I immediately, involuntarily, start cataloging their every mannerism. Every word they utter and every decision they make. I wish I wasn’t like this. It’s a burden. I’ve been hurt by this far more times than I’ve benefited. The reason is because it’s given me the ability to manipulate. The very essence of the people I pretend to love become so evident to me, and everything they’re about immediately become things I could potentially benefit from. It’s dishonest and cruel. Very often, I feel like a terrible person.

I’ve been turning back the theoretical clock, recently. If you’re reading this, you see the link to my dream journal in the top left corner of the blog. If you’re Facebook friends with me, you saw my link to that Pizza Hut commercial from 1992. These are not two unrelated incidences.

The reason I write so openly about these issues is because… well for one thing, it’s therapeutic, but mainly it’s because I’m rarely honest with people in the sense I’ve been writing about. There’s one person I know with the wherewithal to go down this road.

It’s frustrating. I tried discussing good film the other day with a buddy of mine from back home and it was just completely and utterly futile. The problem is he, like so many others, gets so caught up in what he understands is good, he forgets to let his “opinion” get characterized by what he actually enjoys. This isn’t something unrelated to my initial thought process in this post. We disallow ourselves to be entertained by the right things because we are not in touch with our inner child. “Inner child” is a cliche’, borderline corny term, but I’m finding it’s so important to rediscover him.

As a culture, and more directly, as a generation, we look further into things than is necessary. I think if we just allowed ourselves to feel seven again (a lot easier said than done), we’d be more inclined to see real meaning in our lives. It’s so much more complicated than it has to be.

Here are a couple examples of what I’m talking about.

Remember the film The Land Before Time? I do. It’s my first memory actually. Walking along the grassy field on my father’s shoulders outside the Valley Stream train station, on the way to the movie theater. I was 3. You don’t have to be William Shakespeare to understand the simple symbolism the following clip shows. The Great Valley is Heaven. The Tree Star is happiness. Littlefoot’s family represents wisdom and strength. Littlefoot represents us. There’s such beauty in the simplest of messages if we allow ourselves to appreciate it.

This next one I can’t take credit for. A good friend of mine pointed me in this direction the other day…. It’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss. On the surface? A children’s story. In reality? One of the most poignant, insightful pieces of literature imaginable. The message is flawless. Timeless.