childhood When I was young and busily creating the world, I asked a lot of simple questions. Ah, but simple questions can lead to complicated answers as anyone who has spent time with a toddler can attest; "Why is there time?" "Why am I alive?" and the infamous, "Why is the sky blue?" We are all scientists, explorers and philosophers as children. Each day, we make theories and test them out. As a result, we are on 24 hour a day hypocrisy patrol, eagerly rooting out contradictions and inconsistencies in the world around us. Childhood is a time of tremendous expansion. We learn how to see, hear, feel; we create our world by making sense out of all the stimuli we encounter. And while we may agree on the basics, if you really examine the inner and outer workings of people's dogmas and assumptions you soon discover that we are all in worlds that differ slightly or greatly depending on how we have chosen to organize our experiences. The danger is that as adults, many of us decide that we have figured it all out, so we quit creating our world, and it ceases to grow. A symptom of this is boredom, since life no longer has any surprises for such people. Of course, people's worlds can quit expanding at an early age, too, as sometimes happens when a child has had a lot of dogma thrust upon them, leaving them frightened of their own mind. As Anais Nin once wrote, "The world shrinks or expands in proportion to our own courage." As I gathered words for this website, I ended up writing a lot of childhood remembrances. Each of these memories came from a moment of struggle as I decided how to structure my world.