I Love to Laugh

Y'all, I get really weird when I'm off sleep. Like really weird. I have emotional breakdowns and I yell at people and I can't eat and for the past few days my face has been oddly pulsing/spazzing in an effort to make me go to sleep. And all I can think about is swings. Not mood swings, but the kind of swings at the park.

Do you remember how much fun swings were? They were always my favorite thing to do at the park because you could feel the wind on your face and you were moving and playing but you could think at the same time. You could sing while swinging. I sometimes used to read books while swinging low to the ground. You could do it alone or with friends. Swinging was the best. I still do it whenever possible. 

I loved swinging. I could go so high and it was so terrifying and exhilarating and I couldn't stop. One of my friends fell off of a swing and broke his arm, but that didn't bother me at all. I kept on swinging because of the joy it brought to my heart. 

And do you remember learning to pump? One of the reasons I decided I wanted to be a teacher when I grow up is because I loved teaching other kids how to pump. I felt like I had this lump of helpful knowledge that needed to be shared, so I imparted my wisdom onto little kids and taught them how to do it. 

Guys, I just want to be a kid again. I miss feeling revelationally inspired at the end of a good and powerful movie and then running around with my arms out wanting to change the world but not knowing how.  I miss playing pretend every day with my best friend. I miss the privileged feeling of being allowed to stay up until nine to finish a book. I miss tree houses and invincibility. I miss having baby sisters, because now they're both old and not babies anymore. I was the last kid on my street to learn how to ride a two-wheeler, but once I did we all had so much fun riding up and down the street together. I miss that. I miss rollerblading in the rain at night singing songs. I miss reading the American Girl magazine and taking all of their quizzes and wearing exorbitant amounts of purple lip gloss. I miss falling asleep in the car and my daddy carrying me to my bed. I miss having feet fights with my little brother and playing Barbies in the basement all by myself. I miss Arthur, my favorite show. I miss not being allowed to drink caffeine after 4PM. I don’t miss riding the bus home from school, but I do miss making clover chains at recess and I miss my mom buying me a Lunchable on the last day of school every year (the only day a year I was allowed to have a Lunchable). I miss dancing in my room with my CD player to Hilary Duff and Jump5. I miss eating honeysuckles in the backyard. I miss playing in our woods that weren't really woods but felt like a huge forest. I read a book every day when I was little, and I miss having time to do that and I miss stories.

Grown-ups and teenagers and people older than me always told me to enjoy my time being little. They told me it only gets harder from there. And they were right. But I couldn't have enjoyed childhood more than I did. 

I enjoyed it the most when I wasn't actually trying to. When I was in those moments, running around, playing in leaf piles and pretending I was an Egyptian and trying to make mud bricks and wearing clothes that I thought were stylish (but weren't at all and made my mom roll her eyes at me a lot) and tap dancing on the bathroom floor every Sunday morning while I got ready for church and eating cookie dough without worrying about how it would affect the volume of my stomach, when I wasn't thinking about how I was going to have to learn decimals soon in math or how sad I was going to be when my best friend moved to Europe in a few months or how one day I was going to have to do all my homework on a computer and not have time to read books is when I loved being a kid. I felt full of joy - so full that I could spill over and not have lost any joy at all. 

My dad always told me to wear a brick on my head so that I would stop growing. But I didn't want to stop growing. I wanted to be a big girl and I wanted to go to middle school and I wanted to have a cell phone and I wanted to live in an apartment and I wanted to do all of these big-kid things. But my dad was right. He knew he would be. And for that reason, he gave me a brick a few years ago - just something to look at when I'm sad about not being a kid anymore. It's in my closet at home (I'm planning on getting it and bringing it back to my apartment next time I go home) and now that I'm old I do wish I had worn it on my head when I was little enough for it to be effective. 

I keep on doing all of these things like paying my own rent and making my friends take medicine when they're sick and washing my own dishes and cleaning up after myself and then saying, "It's kind of like I'm a grown-up!" And then I realized that I kind of am. I'm definitely getting close. I turned nineteen and a half on Monday, guys. That's a milestone. As my dear friend JC (who turned nineteen and a half the day after I did) pointed out to me, now that we've passed nineteen and a half, we're closer to twenty-one than we are to eighteen. And that is scary. When he pointed this out to me I yelled at him (over text) and said, "I won't grow up! You can't make me! They'll never catch me alive!" 

So Proverbs 31:25 says, "She laughs at the time to come." Another version says, "She laughs without fear of the future." And since I can't go back to childhood (which I would prefer to do), that is what I'm going to do. It doesn't mean not planning ahead or laughing at the future in an effort to mock it, but it means enjoying the moment you're in. If you worry enough about the future, your laughter and happiness chords will shrivel up and die (probably). 

I like to personify non-human objects, and apparently so did Matthew, the guy who wrote the book of Matthew, so we probably would have gotten along well. He says, "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself." He gives tomorrow a human trait: worrying, and at the same time, relieves us from having to do our own worrying. I appreciate that greatly because I am a world-class type-A worrier. 

So what I am saying is yes, sometimes you might have to skip hanging out with fun friends so that you can do homework, and yes, sometimes worrying happens. And sometimes bad/sad things happen. But when you laugh, do so without fear of the future. Enjoy happiness. Squeeze the juice out of the good times and praise God for them and for the joy He allows you to feel as a result of them. But don't forget to be responsible. Also, you are never too old to swing. Swinging can seriously take me from a bad mood to a good one (because of adrenaline and endorphins and other science words I learned as a result of growing up, so maybe there are benefits?) and it lightens my heart. And light hearts are better than heavy hearts any day.

Love,
Lauralicious