As an adult, if someone calls you childish or juvenile, that’s typically not a good thing and often times, you take great offense to it….however I argue that there are plenty of child-like characteristics that are worth emulating—and make us happier as a result. Please don’t knock them until you try them out.

First, Children have short memories and don’t hold grudges… You take away their video game rights for the weekend but the following day, you have a great time playing basketball together in the driveway and you’re still their best friend. As adults, our long memories can often mis-serve us—we all know someone like that (or maybe we are guilty of it sometimes too)—a colleague says something critical to you—and you secretly stay mad at them for several months. Your mother in-law gives you advice on how to improve your banana bread recipe and you secretly curse her at the next 5 family gatherings. I am certainly not saying your colleague or mother-in-law was in the right in either of those cases—me personally, I know I make a damn fine chocolate chip banana bread so to the heck with anyone who says otherwise! However, whether those people on the other side is right or wrong is actually besides the point—the real kicker---the one that kicks us in a bad way is the grudge holding is extremely damaging to our psyche and we’d be much better off acting like kids and have a bit of amnesia.

In the book Unbroken author Lauren Hillenbrand  documents the truly inspiring story of how Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete who then goes to fight for the U.S. during World War II survives a truly awful POW (prisoner of war) experience. During that time he was brutally tortured and beaten by his Japanese captors and miraculously survives the experience, and years later, manages to go back to Japan and tell his captors that he forgives them! I highly recommend the book as a tale of true courage and inspiration—though PSA—it is very heavy—I had to put the book down many times during reading as I didn’t have the emotional fortitude to carry on---yet if he can let go of his anger and grudge (when he has every right to be very angry at the world ten times over), then I’m sure we all can. Just remember, the longer you hold a grudge, the longer it has a hold on you.

Children are easily amused and easily fascinated and that’s a good thing. Go watch the reaction when a 5 year old sees a car driving down the road or sees butterflies—they can be outside chasing butterflies or fireflies for hours—whereas we as adults—especially nowadays with how good modern technology is, our bar for amusement is so high!

I remembered a few years ago during a Chinese New Years performance, I was watching an amazing acrobatic performance---the one where they hold a long stick and spin plates on them—which honestly is something probably less than ½ % of the population can do—but at some point I found myself saying to myself, I’ve seen this trick before and they should do something else instead of plates—how insensible and unappreciative of me (guilty as charged!). There is the Chinese proverb saying 3 minutes of glory on stage is equal to 10 years of hard work off stage. The performers likely spent most of their life mastering the skill of spinning plates on stage—not to mention clumsy me breaks at least a few plates or glasses a year with no sticks involved—and here I was complaining! I felt very embarrassed after thinking about it—honestly if you acted more like children in this aspect, you’ll see that the parts of the world that you view as monotonous or “nothing new here” is actually full of wonders.

Children are present focused—with almost no regard for the past or future. This is how they can go from exuberant to throwing a severe temper tantrum to back to being exuberant again in 10 minutes—they only react to what’s in front of them. As an adult—we are anxious about the future---what signature dish should I make for my friend’s dinner party next, what shall I wear to the wedding next month, am I going to have enough money for retirement? Picture this—you’re on vacation—on your last 2 days, you start worrying about all the work that has piled up in your week-long absence and end up not actually enjoying your time in romantic Paris, the sunny beach of the Bahamas, or whatever exotic location you paid a good sum of Benjamins for. Or we keep on dwelling on the past---several years after I was broken up with by someone on a street corner (couldn’t the jerk have picked a better spot), I still get furious thinking about it.

Clearly as a responsible adult you can’t not have any regard to the future or not use the past as a learning experience, but seriously how much of your time do you spend worrying about a future or past that you have no power of influencing at the current moment? I know for me, too much~ so here’s the deal—I say give yourself permission to worry—but actually set aside the time—for me, it’s after dinner—perhaps with all the food and wine weighing in my stomach, my mind goes haywire—so I allow that bit of time to just worry—past or future—I then I try to let it go the rest of the day. As the wise Buddha said, “do not dwell in the past, do no dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

Until next time, give yourself permission to enjoy whatever is right in front of you—for me currently, it’s the comfort of my fuzzy bathrobe and the scent of my rose and sandalwood candle.