Why you should re-live what you enjoyed doing when you were a kid

I’ve found myself standing in a dark narrow pit, the ground beneath me crunches as I step around ash, dirt and water. My boots that started life as khaki are now unrecognisably black. I reach up into a mechanism of metal rods, the kind you wouldn’t want your fingers to get caught in. Next to me a furnace drops burning embers that trickle down near my feet, they sizzle as they hit the wet ground. I can hear scraping above, the sound of a shovel on a metal grate, a sound that would make the skin on your neck crawl. A sudden hiss from behind startles me before the furnace starts to scream even louder. I look back up into the metal rods, the only light now provided with my handheld torch, all of them are absolutely filthy, covered in a mixture of grit and grease. Each time I wipe one, grease from elsewhere trickles down into my hair. It’s a horrible sensation. I don’t care though, you can’t wipe the smile off my face. After all, the 150 year old steam locomotive I’m underneath has to be ready to push back in half an hour, and it feels fucking great to be a part of making that happen.

As adulthood takes hold of us its easy to forgo all of the things that used to make us incredibly happy growing up and replace them with practical life choices. You go to university to have a formal education so you can get a sensible job which will reliably pay the bills and hopefully net you enough income to support a mortgage, a family, annual holidays to the beach and the Porsche you’ll want to buy when the mid life crisis inevitably rolls around.