“One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love so that one can bear to be with oneself ...” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Last night I had a wonderful dream that I was back on the elementary school playground with my twin sister. So today in my blogging we are going to travel down nostalgia lane.
Remember those days? Pumping on the swing trying to reach the clouds high in the sky? My sister and I often competed with one another to see who could push the limits. She usually won the race because her stamina was much greater than mine.
We were both pretty fearless when it came to heights, but I may have been the greater daredevil. As soon as we crested the top, we’d let go, become air bound and jump to the ground, nearly giving my mother a double heart attack.
An advantage of being a twin is that you have a “built-in” playmate.The challenge of being a twin is that people often treat twins as if they are one unit rather than two autonomous people with individual strengths, likes and needs.
Years ago, child psychologists theorized it was best to keep twins together in the same classroom, but they have since learned not so! http://bit.ly/1lWgEdY. When seventh grade rolled around my twin and I began to learn what life was like with separate groups of friends. We were put into different classes and weaned away from one another, having to adjust to not being together constantly.
Even to this day, we have lots of mutual friends. It wasn’t until I married that we really were completely separated and life has never been the same for us since. In fact for four decades we have lived in different cultural and geographical climates. One lives in the heat and humidity surrounded by a huge population of people, the other in artic temperatures in remote and intimate surroundings.
What we share are similar values that were instilled in both of us when we were little. You’ll learn more about my twin double troubles in my memoir, Gift of a Lifetime: Finding Fulfilling Things in the Unexpected. Click for info & ordering
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I must have had an awesome childhood, because I did this ALL the time. No one stopped us or screamed about health & safety back then. I grew up in the 60s and we kids were always left to our own devices. The playgrounds was simply the best. What about the BIG slide then? Whoooo… Amazing. But we used to stand on the swings and go as high as we could. No one ever died – but as a kid you’d end up with cuts and scratched. But it never, ever stopped any of us. Bliss. Absolute bliss.
Terry, I agree with your position. All of those activities were the essence of childhood, and if we got hurt, we learned from it. Too much shielding and overprotection from parents is not a good thing.
Thanks for your comments.