RE: Contest | 25-Word Comment - Monkey Business | Memories
I remember how I had to walk as a 3-4 year old from kindergarten to home or my grandmother's home. Later as I was an adult I went back to the place I lived during that time and I drove the distance. I must say I was shocked as I noticed how far it was but also the lots of traffic. The same was as we moved to another place. There was no school or shop nearby. As a child I was dropped the first day at the new kindergarten and I had to find my way back home.
With us it's still normal children go to school alone although there are parents taking them. The primary schools are in the area where you live but travelling (mainly by bike) for 1 hour or more is quite normal. No matter the weather the children bicycle.
I agree with you that modern time makes lazy plus there are fewer traffic insights which is a bad thing.
It's getting even worse since children rarely play outside and are raised behind a computer/tablet at school included. Many no longer know how to write with a pencil.
I believe that if you walked/bicycled the way on your own you will never forget it and indeed thinking back it makes me smile as well.
Your comment truly melts my heart. I thought I'm the only one who have experienced this walking 'exercise'. You see, there are many things we did as children which seemed so easy and great but can't do them as an adult.
Truthfully, I can't walk a quarter of the distance I trekked many years back. Whenever I remember this, I would smile and sometimes scream out, wow!
I believe in a way we also "lack" the time to walk these distances. We have so many things to do and rush and as a child you just walked. Perhaps we were distracted by what we saw on our way home, players with water and sand it was not that I had a watch and knew I had to be home within 20 minutes.
It also reminds me of the generation before me. It was normal to let a little child travel by train without an adult. As a child your parent put you on the train and you were picked up by grandma or grandpa or aunt and no one said: Hey, child where are your parents? Today that's no longer possible or even allowed. It's the same for cooking at a young age and so many more things we did. Today it's: be careful, don't play with that you will get sick and so on. Everything is called dangerous today but it's not that we all dropped dead, were poisoned or drowned or were kidnapped. It's the same for going to the shop or market to buy something. I know that I went to buy a small piece of bread for my granny and no one found it weird little children went alone and had money to pay (some shops wrote it on a list and you could pay at the end of the week).
You know as a child the bakery gave you a cookie, the butcher a bit meat to chew on, if you bought fruit they gave you a piece to try and same for cheese. We had that for longer but Covid ended it all and it didn't come back. I bet my hat that the shops are happy with it since it saves them money. Still, I miss the service and the interaction. Today no one cares. They sell their old spoiled stuff and charge the full amount if not more.
Those little gestures and the freedom given to develop yourself and discover the world is what is taken away. I was a very strict school but you know as I was a child we played "cowboy and Indian", you could play being shot and as a child I had a Swiss knife and we played "conquer land" with it and no one got hurt. Today it's all forbidden to have, to play and to say.
Wow! You have gone through beautiful memories. The level of freedom I enjoyed as a child in those days, my children haven't enjoyed such or will they ever enjoy that.
I understand the times are truly evil and dangerous that's why parents these days are very careful not allow children have a free hand like we did.
I think the era of freedom is gone due to the changes in our world today.