We grow up being told, "when you are older, you will understand."

We look up to our parents, older siblings, the 'big kids' on the playground with such wonder. It's so far away, the responsibility, the freedom. We cannot even fathom being part of that world because the time it would take to get to that stage is longer than we have even lived.

Slowly as we grow older, we experience new things. A million firsts, a million ephemeral moments of excitement. Yet we hardly take it all in when experiencing it, never saturate ourselves in the gaining of such knowledge...

We continue to look forward to the next goal.

Then one day, in a fleeting moment of peace, when we finally do look down at the edge of the childhood-imagined cliff we have climbed, we realise that the journey consisted only of a very long and flat hill, where the gradient was so gradual that we did not notice --

we never noticed that the world full of wonder that we were told we would one day inherit, the state where anything is possible if we choose to pursue it, where the future is at our fingertips

-- has already become ours.

Look at the city lights below, the rainbow on the horizon, the northern lights of human experience, beautiful and terrifying; see how they shine for you!

We're in the real world now. No more safety nets, no more childish idealism, no more restrictions. A messy, chaotic and wonderful world -- let's get ready to go and conquer it, hand in hand.