The other day I was just kind of pondering to myself what I think was the best time period of my life.  I feel like it has to come down to college and childhood.  Childhood is a pretty broad period of time where a lot can change so I'm going to say roughly like elementary school.  I think college ultimately wins out, but I'm going to take a minute to discuss the pros and cons of childhood.

I think I overall had a pretty good childhood.  I honestly feel really sorry for people who had terrible childhoods.  I think it sets the stage for the rest of life and also a lot of what is good about it is completely unique and can't be replicated later.  But even still I have to recognize when I remember being a kid, I tend to focus in on the best parts about it.  Things like the feeling of Christmas or my birthday and summer vacations and just getting completely caught up in my imagination while playing with my toys.  It genuinely felt to me like there was magic in the world and that to some extent anything was possible.  That stuff is great and no other time of life can match the highs of that in my experience.

But I think I often overlook that the fun stuff isn't all that childhood is.  Everything is new and pretty intense and while the highs are high, the lows are low.  Experiencing a nightmare while asleep was genuinely terrifying as was the fear of all sorts of potential dangers.  Things like the possibility of being kidnapped or getting lost or even sinking in quicksand were really scary.  Not to mention if anything was possible, then actual monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet could for sure be real.  It's easy to look back and laugh at that sort of thing now, but in the moment it's scary as hell and kind of traumatizing.

I'm pretty sure I laughed a lot more as a kid, which is a wonderful thing, but I know for a fact I cried a lot more, too.  There's an argument to be made that adults should be more in touch with their feelings and cry more, but on the whole I prefer to have less things to cry about.  

The other thing that kind of sucked about being a kid is that a lot of the time you really didn't have any control over what you did.  You were pretty much always told where to be and what to do.  Granted, there were times when you could just kind of go off unsupervised with your friends and have an adventure, and that falls under the best parts of childhood, but there were a lot of times when I'd get dragged somewhere full of boring adults talking about stuff I didn't care about at all and I'd just have to sit and endure it until my parents were ready to go.  I remember church, for instance, being pretty torturous to sit through and there were other things like that.  School could certainly be a drag sometimes.  I did pretty well in it overall and some aspects of it I enjoyed, but I liked summer vacation a lot more and I'd always dread when the back-to-school ads started showing up on T.V.  

It's true that being an adult isn't the utopia of doing whatever you want whenever you want you think it's going to be when you're a kid.  I certainly still have to do a lot of stuff I don't want to do.  But I can go to bed when I choose to, even though an early work morning might necessitate that I retire earlier than I otherwise would.  It's still my choice.  I can just not go to things that don't interest me a lot of times, or if I find myself in a boring movie or something, I can just leave when I want.  That part of adulthood is nice and is something that's not so great about childhood.

The other thing that can be a little frustrating about being a kid is for the most part adults can be pretty condescending to you.  I fully appreciate that kids don't have the same understanding of the world that adults do, but they're not stupid.  When I was a kid I think I possesses roughly the same level of intelligence that I do now.  I just had a lot less less time and experience in the world.  There was a lot of stuff I didn't know simply because I'd never had a chance to encounter it yet.  But I remember it could be kind of frustrating to be talked down to and dismissed, just because you were a kid.  Stuff like that was a big part of why I wanted to be older.  I wanted an ounce of respect, damn it.

Another thing I recall was that my older brother could be pretty mean to me sometimes when I was a kid and that wasn't a lot of fun.  I think he'd get bored sometimes and then come down to my room to mess with me just for entertainment purposes.  He'd make fun of me or put me down or even kind of beat me up a little.  He was bigger and stronger than me so there wasn't much I could do about it other than try to get him in trouble with the parents.  That feeling of helplessness wasn't so great.  It's not even like he was the worst person in the world, I just think that's the sort of thing siblings often do.  

Anyway, there were some really wonderful and amazing parts of being a kid, but there was pretty big downsides to it, too.  And that's why ultimately it doesn't win "best time of my life".  College loses out on some of the best aspects of childhood, but it avoids almost all of the worst parts.  Additionally it has a lot of the best parts of being an adult while avoiding a lot of the worst parts of that.  I'll probably go into more details in a later post since I've already written a lot today, but that right there is the reason why I think college wins out.