Second Childhood or Real Adulthood?

This is my niece Caitlyn when she was younger, I'm going to say 4-ish. 

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This summer, on my way home from Guam, I stopped over to see my family on Oahu. I spent the day cruising town on a Friday because everyone else was working. When I told my brother what I did that day, he made a comment, in a form of a question: 'Wait, you went to a crack seed store, then Gecko's, then Jelly's, Is there a theme here?" I caught his drift. 

Not only that, I said, when I was in Guam, I did spoken word! There's a phrase for this.  Not a "mid-life crisis," maybe "second childhood," but not in a negative way. I am connecting to my whims, to my interests, without any guilt. Just doing it because it feels right to explore my interests. Really getting a sense that past, present, future are all one. I don't think I'm a better version of me now than I was in the past. I love unearthing my past and being at peace with it. I want to do things, like spoken word, and not talk myself out of it because I'm too old. 

Madeline L'Engle writes eloquently about this in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.

"Only the most mature of  us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, but I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and ... and ... and..."

"If we lost any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If we cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away."