Kids
Image via Wikipedia
I was reading this brief article the other day about how all people are essentially still just children deep down within themselves with the same primal fears and hopes and insecurities and longings that they have always had since they were barely winking at the sky from their strollers. Well, I was on the London Underground a lot this weekend, way down deep like a mole underneath the dirt and concrete and history of the city above me. I kept thinking about how all of this life is happening just above us. Friends are being made and relationships are ending while men beg for loose change and mothers and daughters ping back and forth from the H&M and The Gap on Oxford Street. All of this life is happening up above but down below, in these brightly lit trains, no one is talking, no one is making eye contact, no one is even smiling. Which is interesting given the lengths that the administrators of the Underground have taken to create a child-like environment. There’s music playing throughout the long corridors from performers. The logo is a composite of crisps and bright colors while advertisements are pasted on every wall throughout the deep. Inside the cars, you’ll see polls to hang onto that are painted a bright but muted shade of yellow; blue plastic along the edges trim red seats. It feels like a jungle gym for grown-ups in there, but they are all just kids trapped in overstuffed bodies. No smiles, no eyes, and no voices either, as if someone might find out they’re not really grown-up after all, as if Peter Pan wasn’t knocking around the interior walls of their bodies.
That is until a small Chinese girl climbed aboard with her mother, no more than 2; she was polite and sweet and talkative. The smiles broke out on everyone around me in wonder at this child, and you could sense for a moment that they felt like the charade was up. We’re all still 2 years old when it comes down to it. 
