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?