Needle, Meet Haystack

“I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.” – Pete (Paul Rudd), Knocked Up

Do you remember being thrilled by the smallest things when you were a kid?  Like playing with the box your toys came in more than the toys themselves.  Maybe you just ran around in the backyard with imaginary friends.  Or maybe you turned an empty paper towel tube into a sword, telescope, cane, magic wand, or drumstick (with the help of a second tube, of course).  Perhaps you made up stories with your dolls or action figures, having Destro and the Shredder team up to fight Batman and He-Man.*  You were fascinated by anything and everything, eager to explore the world, whether that meant that the world was your bedroom, the backyard, your neighborhood, or somewhere entirely new.

So what happened?  As we grew older, cynicism and realism replaced curiosity and wonder.  We exchanged fascination for perspective, traded in joyful exuberance for haughty indifference.  Ask anyone to discuss something that they’re passionate about, and you might see a flicker of that old childhood happiness.

But for anyone who wants to recapture the spirit of youth, there are two choices: reversion or expansion.

Reversion is something that we’ve dealt with before in the form of revertigo.  But rather than just experiencing it with friends, we can experience it with things.  But I’m not talking about going out to get a DVD box set of an old cartoon favorite (He-Man kinda sucks in retrospect, fyi) – I’m talking about diving in headfirst, completely unironically, without the pretensions of “retro cool,” into something that you used to love.

I do this with comic books, in case you haven’t noticed (explicit examples can be found here, here and here, lesser examples here, here and to a lesser degree, here), and lemme tell ya – it works.  Every time I crack open a four-color adventure (or a black and white one, if you know what I mean), it returns me to the joyful escapist days of my youth.  And that infectious energy has at least a short-term transitive effect on whatever else I’m doing, be it blogging, working, making music, or relaxing.

But the problem with reversion is that the more you use it, the less potent it becomes.  So you might want to go the other way, with expansion.

While reversion is all about going back to how things were and reliving memories, expansion is all about trying new things and getting the feelings back.  And while it’s more effective and has a greater influence, it’s also riskier and has a larger chance of failure, especially since the results are not guaranteed in any capacity.

Here’s a couple of examples of how expansion works.  Since its triggers can be different for every person, these come from myself and some friends.

• Spend the entire day pretending to be a foreign tourist (complete with accent).  Do the things that you would normally do, but come up with a complete back-story, and stay in character at all times.
• Burst into song in public.  This works especially well if you have a cohort of friends, as you can harmonize.
• Try out something you always wanted to do.  This can be anything from having ice cream for breakfast to buying that toy you always wanted but never got.

Expansion is all about moving outside of your comfort zone, wish fulfillment, and experimentation.  One of the best examples I’ve seen recently is over at Sydney Owen’s blog, with her new love, skydiving.

Sydney started out talking a bit about having wanted to go skydiving, then having done it, then to talking about it with alarming frequency, to getting to the point where her passion for it has literally consumed her entire blog.  Her last month and a half’s worth of posts have only been about that subject.  And you can tell that she’s enraptured with it.  She’s found a new outlet that lets her recapture the feeling that so many of us struggle to find.

So if you’re looking for a bit of lost childhood, whether it’s due to a quarter-life crisis, a case of the mopeys, or just because, you’ve got some choices to make.  You can reconnect with your past self in ways that are familiar or brand new.  And while you don’t have to start reading comic books en masse or try jumping out of airplanes, you can probably find some way to make yourself smile.

Maybe you should try bubbles.

* Okay, I clearly have more experience with one side of that example than the other; sorry, ladies.