22/07/2026
“If childhood is gathering seashells, adulthood is returning them to the tide…”
What a beautiful poem written by Becky Hemsley - I felt I had to share!
“As children, we are little learners in the world, wide-eyed and eager.
We learn the rules of balance and politeness, the sound of our own names when called across a room.
We learn that water can be trusted to hold our reflection, that words have shape and numbers have weight.
We memorise the routine of belonging: raise your hand, wait your turn, colour inside the lines.
The world builds us like a tower of bright blocks - each stacked carefully, one on top of the last.
Then, somewhere in adulthood, the tower trembles.
We discover that not every reflection can be trusted: some waters distort, some mirrors lie. We learn again that words have shape, but now they can wound; that numbers have weight, but now they drag us down into comparison and debt. The lessons go from photograph to negative.
And so begins the second education: the unlearning. We unlearn the habit of saying sorry for existing. We unlearn that love must be earned, that rest is laziness. And we realise that the lines we were told to colour within were never really there at all.
If childhood is gathering seashells, adulthood is returning them to the tide; listening again for the song inside and realising it was never the ocean speaking, only our own breath echoing in a borrowed shell. And in that quiet, we begin to learn again, though this time the lesson is smaller, softer: that perhaps growing up was always about finding a way back.
Because that song in the borrowed shell was always just our own voice.
Calling us home.”
*****
Becky Hemsley 2025
Gorgeous artwork by Oksana Liubiceva
This poem is from If The Stars Could Speak: https://amzn.to/3SRapSQ
(affiliate link)
