Being a grown-up is a boring job. It is a job to begin with — a big one where people expect you to do big things like earn money and have “important” things like houses, and cars, and all those expensive stuff that have nothing to do with being happy. Remember Le Petite Prince?
We all have times when we tell our kids to never grow up because they’re so adorable and we don’t want them to grow into larger human beings bedeviled by worldly problems.
I foolishly once begged my son a long time ago to never grow up, to which he politely said “yes”, only to shoot up to a five-foot-nine 14-year-old anyway. I’m doing the same to our daughter now. Grown ups never learn, I know.
Besides being adorable, we also don’t want our kids to grow up too soon because childhood is a happy place that you can’t go back to. Time machines have yet to prove they work.
When you get to an age when people earnestly begin to explain to you that magic isn’t real and unicorns don’t exist, that’s when life starts to get boring, and then being happy becomes a job.
Adulting for Dummies: Who Else Needs to Know a Thing or Two About Being Happy?
A few days ago, we sat around the dinner table and started recalling our life as kids. So much positive energy bounced around the room and there was just so much joy in sharing stories about the kind of games we played {the ones that young people know nothing about because we didn’t press buttons to play}. We played funny pranks on people {house helps were favorite victims, so it seemed} and recalled all the mischievous deeds we enjoyed as kids.
It was the call of the dirty dishes that brought us back to reality, and that is what makes adulthood not so fun sometimes. You need to have time for everything, yet not really have enough time for…well, everything.
Frances Beldia
I don’t wish to go back in time although I may sound like it sometimes. The tunnels that lead us back to happier times in our lives are called childhood memories, and they certainly help when we need to remember that life isn’t entirely a long foreboding journey. Oh well, we do need an adulting for dummies guide from time to time, but it can’t be so bad.
We are better versions of ourselves now, but the younger us weren’t so bad either. We were just more genuinely joyous. And again, being happy wasn’t something you had to think about. The world looked so much brighter and had more free-spirited people in it.
For our homeschool film-showing last Tuesday, we watched Mark Osborne’s take on The Little Prince, a reinvention of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book of the same title published in 1943. We watched the charming 1974 fantasy-musical The Little Prince last year. This is why Attika, who couldn’t read that time yet, knew Le Petite Prince so well.
My Re-acquaintance with Le Petite Prince Made Me Realize Why Adulthood Isn’t Always Fun
Inescapable zombie pre-programming. On the average, a person spends 16 years getting himself “educated” so he could, later in life, spend eight to nine hours a day in a job he hates. He drags himself to work like clockwork five, maybe seven, days a week. He complains about it, but does it anyway.
Being happy is just another concept. Everyone is sure they’ve heard the word “happy” somewhere from someone but can’t quite put a finger on it.
Question: What makes you happy?
*Crickets…crickets* Does anyone have a copy of Adulting for Dummies?
Vacations don’t come for free anymore. One has to work like a horse to go on a decent vacation. Don’t you miss the times when everyone enthusiastically volunteered to pay for your travels? I certainly do.
Daydreaming equates to being lazy. When you’re young it’s synonymous to the word imagination, and imagination is good. It was what summers and afternoons and dawns were for me. When you’re an adult you have to do something, or at least pretend to do something, while daydreaming, so no one accuses you of being lazy. Or crazy. They even have a word for that. It’s called multitasking.
Meal planning never ends. “What do you want for breakfast, lunch, dinner?” Repeat twenty times, and if you get lucky you will get an answer that’s not “anything”, then repeat 365 times. Life was easier when I was from the “anything” end.
The must-haves list is a very long one. Most adults’ head-to-toe list of must-haves is kilometric. I never thought I would be told I’d need ten different things for my face alone. Not ever.
Nap times used to be a daily requirement. In an adult’s life it is a million-dollar privilege.
Even if I said all that, being a grown-up isn’t all that bad. Being able to think about what life was like and how to make it better from there is a gift.
I believe everything that happens to us is a result of the choices that we’ve made.
Frances Beldia
The one thing that’s great about being an adult is having a choice. So you can’t blame your imaginary friend anymore if your life turns out to be…a little bit less than what you hoped for.
Cure for Mondays 