Being a kid at heart means refusing to surrender the last tiny spark of madness the world has been trying to beat out of you since the moment you learned the word “responsibility.” It’s the deranged, wide-eyed conviction that there’s still magic hiding behind the grocery store, or buried under a pile of leaves, or drifting somewhere up in the night sky between the Walmart parking-lot lights and the Big Dipper. It’s knowing, deep in the spinal cord that the universe is still weird and full of secret doors, and god help you if you ever stop looking for them.

A kid at heart doesn’t walk through life; he barrels through it with the same reckless momentum you had when you were nine and hopped the fence to see what was on the other side. It means you still taste adventure in the air, even on a Tuesday. You still get that electric jolt in your bones when you hear the clean snap of a baseball bat, or the roar of the ocean, or the crack of thunder cutting open the sky like a divine warning shot.

To be a kid at heart is to carry a permanent sense of wonder, an outlaw religion. It’s not innocence; innocence burned off years ago like fog on a desert highway. No, this is defiance. A middle finger raised to boredom, routine, and every beige-colored piece of adulthood that tries to glue you to a chair and tell you that this is simply how life goes. A kid at heart rejects that. A kid at heart throws rocks at that idea and runs laughing through the trees.

It’s the refusal to let the world calcify you. It’s choosing joy over cynicism, curiosity over comfort, mischief over monotony. It’s remembering what it felt like to believe in impossible things and still believing in at least one of them, even if the rest crumbled under mortgages, deadlines, and the grim machinery of daily life.

Being a kid at heart means you still chase sunsets for no reason. You still pull over on the side of the road because the sky looks insane and you can’t not take a picture. You still laugh too loud, climb rocks you probably shouldn’t, and get irrationally excited when you find an old comic book in a thrift store bin.

It means you never stop exploring, not the woods, not the world, not the haunted corners of your own mind.

And maybe, more than anything, it means you never stop believing that life, at its core, is supposed to be a little wild, a little ridiculous, and absolutely worth wandering through with wide eyes and muddy shoes.

A kid at heart isn’t someone who refuses to grow up.

A kid at heart is someone who refuses to give up the parts of themselves that were worth keeping.

And that, my friend, is the only sane way to survive in this beautifully deranged world.

*in the photo is my friend Robert*