There are a lot of scary things about getting older, whether it be an uncertain future or maybe just lines on your face. But one thing that bothers me most is that I’m growing weary of that which seems to bring an immense amount of joy.

When I was really young, around the age of three or four, I lived in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Our house was small and cozy with a giant backyard and a creek way back. I spent the days climbing trees, digging holes and filling them with water, making “pee” soup with grass and mud and water and urine (modeled after pea soup from a movie around the time, apparently we didn’t understand) and listening to Whit Theobald tell us about how our time capsule (I don’t think I knew what a capsule was, much less a conception of time) was going to get taken by satan in a few months.

Yet to this day I am still mesmerized by the creek nearby. At that age, young and naive, I jumped gingerly from side to side, moving quickly to keep up with whatever was floating by, only occasionally falling in. It was a lot of fun, just a little boy and his small body of water. I think every little guy needs his own little place to explore. But I grew. And as I grew older the sting of pride that came from falling into water I’d hoped to avoid grew sharper and the joy narrower. My steps became cautious, my lunge methodical and slow, and at a rate invisible except in retrospect, the joy from that activity left me.

In school I gained friends. I threw myself at whoever I could spend time with and grew fond of them. And when they moved, it hurt. When they betrayed me, it burned. But it couldn’t stop, I didn’t know any better. Then came girls and that rush of emotion that floods that part of you right above your lowest rib. And the heartbreak, that emptiness that sweeps out all that was there. Steps back.

What worries me most is that as humans we grow tired. We cease to enjoy the masochistic activity of investing ourselves into relationships that we so cynically dismiss as failed before they begin. We refuse to allow ourselves to hurt like we have so many times before, and we move away from one of the very things that makes us human. Without vulnerability, friendships are shallow, and with it they are dangerous. Unfortunately, risks look less and less appealing as we age. And that bothers me. I’m growing tired, I’m withdrawing, and it’s scaring me.

Maybe this idea of investing ourselves completely in an unmovable being named God is the way to go. It certainly sounds infinitely more appealing than being burned yet again. But what is left is an empty shell of a human, an incomplete person for the rest of the world to interact with, one who refuses to give even that part of themselves.

Unfortunately, I know these sort of questions don’t have easy or even definite answers. Moving away to a far away country is not going to settle things with the mind I’ll drag along there. And books cannot teach lessons that life alone has the plans for. Climbing cranes and scaling buildings certainly carries that unnecessary risk, but it seems that brick walls and steel ladders too lack the information I’m looking for.

People should be shot.