Dear Dr. Rick,    My teenage daughter doesn’t take life seriously enough.  She seems to be more naive and innocent than her peers and simply laughs about things that don’t go her way.  She just laughed off not making the high school basketball team, and missing an A in math by 0.1 points.  How will she ever make it thru life if she doesn’t wise up to the importance of all this?      from Angela in Brookfield

Hi Angela,    This is a really really good question.  I am so glad you asked this.  Do you realize that most of us as some time in our youth change from happy and carefree to serious and frustrated.  We start to focus on results instead of experiences.  We start to focus on the “end” rather than the journey.  We start to worry more about the future than we do enjoying the present.

    Then, usually about the time of our “midlife crisis,” we realize that we have been missing so much, and we try to bring our joyful and carefree nature back to us.  We realize that the worry is usually wasted because the negative thoughts we have are about things that usually never materialize.  We read books, go to workshops, even enter therapy just to be able to appreciate the present and “live in the now” again.

    Well, I suggest that your daughter is a genius!  She has found a shortcut through all that, and is really a couple of decades ahead of her peers.  She has found a way to avoid all the years of trying to be who she isn’t, trying to control all that happens around her.  If she can hold on to that carefree perspective, life will unfold before her in magical ways.  Take away all the resistance, and all the intense focus on outcomes, and on things outside of us, and we all become more in alignment with the world, and the true enjoyment and happiness comes from inside of us, not from what happens outside of us.  You have heard that it is not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives, but it is our attitude about what happens that truly makes our lives enjoyable.

  It appears that we all take life too seriously.  Perhaps we could spend more time just being carefree and enjoying the “now!”  Let’s all be like your daughter, and spend more time just laughing it off!       Enjoy, Rick