I have been contemplating the ideal of happiness over the past week. I have known quite a few people in my life who I would consider to be happy. Some of them have been wealthy, some have been poor. Some have worked for a living and some have been stay at home mom’s.
Today as I was thinking on this subject I thought back to my childhood. I remember being a very happy child. I was not raised in a happy home at all but I was happy.
I began to think about why I had been so happy as a child and I realized one thing. I had imagination. In the farmhouse that I grew up in I imagined that I had a restaurant called “Kozy Korner” down in our basement. I made up a menu for that restaurant and when some of my friends would come over we would play restaurant.
I would also pretend I was a catalog clerk and spent hours taking orders from invisible customers.
On days when I was forced to stay inside I would line up my dolls on the couch and pretend I was a Sunday school teacher. I would even use props to teach them their lessons.
When it was nice outside I would go out into our garage and play in my playhouse out there, swatting at the flies and wasps, and petting the little kitties who used it as a home.
I didn’t have that many friends and my brother who was closest to me in age hardly ever played with me but that didn’t matter, I was still happy.
I did have one friend that I would bike a mile to meet. Then when it was summertime we would bike into town to go swimming together. After we were done swimming, we would stop by the Dairy Queen and I would get a chocolate dipped ice cream cone and she would get one too.
Being that I was raised on a farm I had to work a lot too. It was not all fun. I had to help my Mom garden and pick mulberries. I had to help my Dad haul in irrigation pipe. There were lots of chores to be done and I knew better than to refuse to do them. On a farm everyone has to work and no one is allowed to say “No.”
I think the key to my happiness as a child was that I was always busy imagining. Did you have a happy childhood? If you did, can you pick out one characteristic which was the key to your happiness?
I played in a kitchen cabinet under the counter where all the canned goods were stored, I would rearrange them and “sell” them to my mom, making change with play money. Stability was the key to my happiness I think. I only had child worries and child responsibilities. My parents were young but they took their roles as adults and made me and my four brothers feel safed, loved and cared for. I got to be a kid as long as I was one. Grateful.
That is such a wonderful comment, insightful and wise. It is important for a child to be able to be a child throughout childhood. So many children in the world have to take on adult responsibilities due to the incompetence of their parents. Sometimes I wonder if my children, which are all adults now, have been spoiled because sometimes when they come back home they still act as if they are children. lol Maybe I should not be so competent. haha
I am glad you had stability as a child. I also never had to worry about being fed or being clothed because of the stability of my parents. It is a luxury which some children will never know.