Go Outside And Play

If you were born between, say, 1950 and 1970, "go outside and play" was the constant refrain of mothers everywhere in the US. No one was then particularly worried about kidnappers or sex offenders, children roamed neighborhoods in great packs like wild dogs, and mothers just seemed to need a lot of time to bake cookies, hang out laundry, cook the dinner, watch Peyton Place etc., without having to manoeuver around kids draped over the furniture or lying on rugs, playing video games. Actually, back then there were no video games, and daytime TV was not (still isn't) kid-friendly, so what the kids were doing was complaining. "I'm bored," "I'm hungry," "Janey's teasing me," "I can't find my [Malibu Barbie], [GI Joe], [Man O'War model horse]." So mom would get fed up -why does no one ever say they're fed up anymore, anyway?- and tell the kids to go outside and play. Or "go play in the street," if the mom had a sick sense of humor. I loved that, when the moms would say that.
Then the kids would heave big sighs, like it was the worst thing in the world to breathe fresh air, heave themselves out of dad's Laz-y-boy, and shlump out the door, not to return till dinnertime. Well, I have to qualify, here. I was always out the door before mom had to tell me. She actually had to beg me to come in. I was lucky enough to live at the edges of a place and a time that barely exist today, where suburb melted into farm, and farm melted into woods. Almost every day, my friends and I were denizens of forest and field, plucking princess pine vines to wreath around our heads, galloping like horses -we WERE horses, snorting and tossing our manes- leaping into streams, following the trails of animals, just to see where they went, where their hidey-holes were.
It was magic.
I am lucky enough to still have some of those magical places to go. They have not all been swallowed up by housing developments. The place I first rode remains(the horse was kept by a lovely woman who let my horse- crazy friend Holly and I ride and groom her Chincoteague pony - another near-impossibility in this day of liability). It is still a place of wonder, with big cattails growing, and marsh, and the sky always seems to be blue with big puffy clouds. I remember my first gallop there, down the hard-packed dirt paths, though a big field, the saddle slipping, the rough mane in my hands. The dangerous and wild feeling of it. I often try to re-capture that feeling, when going out to play meant that anything could happen, any wonder. Sometimes I can. Today I went out to that same field to collect Queen Anne's lace to press in newspaper for Christmas (when it makes wonderful snowflakes for the tree). As I spread out the paper, started cutting the flat, plate-sized delicate flowers with the sun on my back, I got that feeling, that child-wonder, that feeling of timelessness. I get it when I go rapberry picking in the places they grow wild (I find old sunny graveyards attract raspberries, as the stony tops of hills attract wild blueberries).
So, for today, try to remember that feeling of wonder, try to rekindle it. Go Out And Play, somewhere you have felt that wonder in the past. Take your Happiness Book with you. Plan on spending time to become timeless. Then write it, draw it.