Remember Back When

Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning tennis versus soccer?” You just ran around the playground and played tennis and soccer. 

You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster. 

Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement. 

And the beautiful thing was, if you hated tennis, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it or you didn’t. 

And if you loved looking for bugs, you just did that. There was no second-level analysis of, “Well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to look for bugs, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? How will looking for bugs affect my future prospects? 

There was no bullshit. If you liked something, you just did it.

A child does not walk onto a playground and say to herself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun. 

If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you’re not going to enjoy anything.

And the real truth is that you already enjoy something. You already enjoy many things. You’re just choosing to ignore them.

“You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”
― Dr. Seuss

Joseph back in 2008 enjoying interacting with the lambs