Days of Innocence

How I miss them. Those innocent days of childhood, when life was simple and the emotional struggles of my day consisted of a missing toy or a push from a sibling. What would it be like to go back? To forget about the hectic low paying job, the mounting bills, and the leaking roof?

*Sigh*

And yet, I remember those days. Every year looking forward to a new age. I could hardly wait to turn 13, then 16, then 18. It seemed to take forever! And then I was grown, in love, married, then a mother. And now looking back at the years I so willingly wished away, wishing only to take them back, if just for a moment.

So it is with life, with us humans who inhabit this less then perfect world. Our nature longs for something else. Always something else. If we are old we wish to be young. If we are young we wish to be older, wiser. If our hair is straight we want it curly. If curly we want it straight.  We long for more, what we have is never enough. More money. More possessions.

Contentment might be in our vocabulary but not in our hearts. But it should be...

If you are reading this, you should be content because you live in a country that provided you with the education to do so. If you are reading this, you live in a location that gives you access to the internet, which you are either blessed with the funds to pay for or are provided free of service by such wonderful gifts as your local library. If you are reading this you are most likely not among the poorest of the world accounting for 40% of the earth's population. If you are reading this you are alive and not one of the 24,000 children who die every day due to poverty.

Maybe it is time to put things in perspective. Instead of comparing our lives to the minority of wealthy individuals we should be comparing it with the majority of needy and impoverished. Maybe we have more to be thankful for then we thought...