I was nine years old when the sheer scale of things first occurred to me. I don’t really remember that I was nine, but I remember exactly where I was sitting at the moment I had some pretty mind blowing thoughts.
I was sat in my school hall during morning assembly. We were always organised into rows according to year group and I was a few rows from the back, so I must have been in fifth year – nine years old. I never once paid attention in school assembly and I’m not ashamed. I was a dreamer. A thinker. And that thirty-minute slot was precious to me.
On this particular day I was thinking about the world – planet Earth. There I was in my primary school hall, in a small town in Essex, in England, in the UK, in Europe, on planet Earth, in the Milky Way, floating around unsupported in a universe of infinite scale.
It seemed impossible! How could that be possible? To be sitting on a giant sphere of rock, water and gas held up by nothing? And so it occurred to me that if that was indeed possible, then anything could be possible. Quite literally anything that my nine-year-old mind could think of, and much more that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend, could be absolutely possible in this world of the seemingly impossible. But what was the meaning of it all?
Woah.
I think my head began to hurt so I scaled back my thoughts to something more manageable. I didn’t know then how many countries there were, or how many miles the circumference of the globe was, but I knew this world was big. A huge world of different landscapes, animals and people. And I thought then what a horrible waste it would be if I didn’t try to explore just some of it.
So that’s what I do, when I can. For little Chickadee, aged nine.