Make it feel like home.

Home

It means something different to all of us.

You can live side by side with someone and share the same topical experiences and yet have completely different versions of what made you happiest. What made you feel like "home". 

And we all want to get back to that.  We all want to live that happiness. To live it on a constant basis. Don't we?  We want that feeling of complete bliss, of utter unabashed happiness.*

How about this? Whatever comes,  let it come and whatever leaves, let it leave and just love it all.  No matter what.  Isn't that simple?  So why is it so hard to do?

As children this is how we lived. We didn't know any better. Whatever came that is what we accepted. We had no frame of reference for much else. Slowly as we saw more, learned more and experienced more this was no longer the case. Was it?  But in the beginning it was. That is the beauty of a child. That is what we should not tarnish. Imagine being safe enough to live like that every day, every moment.

We can. It is possible. It involves pain though. It involves letting yourself feel pain and being alright with it. Just being perfectly alright with it. If you can find beauty in anything, then you carry home in your heart permanently. 

*The problem is that place exists in the past, because it emanated from your heart alone. The heart of a child and you no longer have that heart. It's been "toughened up", it's "grown up", it doesn't even remember how to get back to that depth of feeling anymore. It's learned to "fake it". It's learned to be superficial, flippant, vain.  Hasn't it?

Park counsellors

I remember park counsellors.  Now you have to pay for this privilege.  I hope that means that the staff is better educationally prepared in child psychology (through experience and schooling). and truly loves the kids.*

But that also means that some can't participate. During summers and I think it was weekends and after school they had the park rec room open and you could check out a ball, jumprope, etc. some days they had crafts. They had little pocket game tables. It was fun. I would spend hours at the park and my parents thought I was safe. I was safe, until the day they sent me home I guess.  Although I didn't feel threatened and even being a kid I knew what that felt like. My instincts, much like a dogs, usually told me so. Although to some extent I've lost this from not using it, of course.

Is it too much cost to have that kind of program, too much liability. Have cities mismanaged money to such a huge extent and no one notices (like happened in Bell, California). Have possible grants dried up to fund wars no one cares about with our countries children?  Who knows?

It was nice, it was good to be outside playing, healthy, I was so truly happy. I see kids now, my kids, a lot of other kids, and they seem to unhappy. Neuroticly so even and this technology epidemic may be to blame, but not getting outside. Not playing, not interacting without structure with other people, isn't teaching them life skills. The majority of the population learns with "hands on training". It's no different with life.

*Kids are hard. Especially a gaggle of them. Then make me from a bad neighborhood...where they are taugh to distrust all authority. Yikes. (Rich aren't any better though. They disregard authority out of snobbery.)