Learn to embrace your childhood, stay young at heart

On April 4, two events happened that were impactful to many students: Bill Nye as a guest speaker and the re-release of the movie, “Titanic,” in theaters.

For many of us, both of these events were like flashbacks to our childhood – a nostalgic reliving of coming home after school to watch “Wishbone” on PBS, riding bikes with the neighborhood kids, begging for a Furby for Christmas and seeing how high the number on the Skip-It could actually get.

Bill Nye and “Titanic” were two separate events, but because they coincidentally occurred on the same day, it was a day that created a whirlwind of childhood memories in many students’ minds.

Childhood was a time for us to have fun and relax, but it didn’t exactly come at the right time. When we were kids, we didn’t appreciate just how fun it was to be young and to have no responsibilities.

Now, as college students, we must relive the carefree years that we had through watching old movies, replaying songs like “No Scrubs” and “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and conducting an occasional eBay search for old Easy-Bake Ovens (or maybe that’s just me). Just because the ‘90s have come and gone, however, doesn’t mean that all is lost.

Everything we learned from our childhood and preteen years, from taking Jack Dawson’s words to heart when he says “to make each day count” to learning that when we grow up we “don’t want no scrub” are all lessons that have stuck with us forever.

It is these lessons, embedded in the old school music and classic movies that have molded us into what we are today. These are the lessons that we should carry with us for our entire life, because these are the things that taught us about relationships, different perspectives and just about life in general.

Perhaps one of the largest cues that our generation had that our childhood has officially ended was the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2 last year. Because most of us grew up with the Harry Potter name spoken everywhere we went, the last movie being released marked the end of an era, and it signaled a new chapter in our lives.

As we move on in our lives to graduate from college and eventually get professional jobs in the real world, it is important that we learn to look back on our childhood and embrace the experiences that we had.

These memories are what will keep us young at heart and rejuvenated for whatever we may face in the future. Now is the time to reflect on our past, embrace all that we had as children and take in all that was great about our childhood.

Now is the time for us to improve on ourselves through reminiscing, and face the next 20 years with the same oomph and passion that we did with the first 20.