*fall 1993, senior year*
A glass of wine down and in the middle of a 3 way international conference call last night, my two old friends of mine and I started to reminisce and discuss how we (or people in general) lose the carefree nature that we all had in our youth.
Full fledged adults now, with mortgages, bills, 9-5 jobs, responsibilities and even a wife now, we have all seemed to forgotten the carefree nature that we once had. It's a sobering and bittersweet feeling to have fading feelings of those days. Now days we spend most of our hours trying to make a comfortable lifestyle by working our asses off. The irony of those days was that we didn't have to work at all to live an aesthetic lifestyle of being happy.
I put it bluntly to Ryan last night in saying how I remember how easy it was to come home from school, drop off the backpack, grab the basketball, head over to his house next door and roll up the street to shoot hoops until dinnertime, wolf down dinner and then head back out again to do whatever adventurous & mischievous deeds we deemed fit for ourselves until bedtime. Wake up the next day and repeat. Same after that day...til the weekend when school wasn't a factor and we had all day to misbehave and do what we wished.
Albeit, we had that carefree style due to our parents bearing the responsibility of feeding, clothing and sheltering us, but now we spend most of our days occupying ourselves with providing those same things all the while working and saving towards the far future wherein, more than likely, we will not fully be able to enjoy the fruits of our efforts due to old age.
Which is complete bullshit.
Which all the more reinforces my fledgling idea of just saying fuck it and doing things that make you happy.
We as adults have lost that ability to just "play". There is an inherit goal in some way to every action we do, which makes us jealous of our own past childhood. As youth, we did things because we just felt like it, because it gave us joy, or it was something new, or sometimes for no reason at all. Why did you jump up and down on the bed? Why did you dig in the dirt? Run after the Ice Cream man? Why did you go climb a tree? Because it was fucking there.
And it was usually better when you did it with a friend.
