Just Another Friday…
My mom says that from the moment I was born, I was laughing—that’s apparently the first thing I did. And I always hear from adults that I was always laughing and smiling…I’ve been thinking about that…
Since my birthday is coming up next week and I’ll be turning twenty, I am realizing more and more that I am no longer a child. And as an adult, there are responsibilities that I acquire. But that also got me thinking about how the older I got, the less I laughed. High school, and middle school too, proved to be emotional challenges, and I got more self-conscious and I had those horrible teen years where most go through an identity crisis! It was, from what I recall, awful!!
And so I think about adults today, and they’re always worrying about everything: money, love, sex, work, success, their bodies and their looks, and all sorts of things! They’re always so stressed out and they have such a hard time enjoying the simple pleasures in life. But you see kids, and they don’t. They’re not worried being fat, or whether they have the best looking stuff. They just enjoy life so freely that it’s beautiful. And sometime when they get to elementary school or middle school, adults start telling them that life is though and things aren’t nice. And we start telling them to grow up and stop dreaming. But really, we just say that because we have stopped dreaming. After all, what’s so wrong with dreaming big, and laughing for nothing, or enjoying everything?
Just because we grow up doesn’t mean we have to stop living. We don’t become machines. Life is really quite simple, but we complicate things more and more the older we get. Maybe, along the way—while we are growing—we forget just how much we used to play, and laugh. I think that that’s all we need: a little more laugh and play (and not the: “let’s get drunk, have countless sex, and go crazy”). I mean, isn’t it better to keep that childish freedom? Can’t we grow up and have responsibilities, and at the same time be able to enjoy life freely?
