Hop Into The DeLorean Of Life In 2018

The bells have rung, the ball has dropped, and we are now safely into 2018. Everywhere you look om social media, people are making their New Year’s resolutions and making their choices for the coming twelve months. Weight loss. Car savings. Buying a house. All of these are big resolutions and promises to make, but the one thing that they all have in common is how utterly adult they all are. When do we even become adults? We get to eighteen and head off to college, making big waves and choices about our futures, and yet we don’t feel like adults yet. We get to our mid-twenties, and we’re getting married and having babies, and yet we still don’t quite feel like adults who are living lives away from our parents. The reason for this is because there’s no clear line between feeling young, vital and carefree and feeling responsible while growing roots for a family.

These grown-up resolutions are great, but they’re not particularly fun. Adulthood is wonderful for its freedom from parents, curfews and rules, but when the shackles of being ruled by parents fall off, other shackles clamp right on. Paying bills, raising children, making decisions about life insurance and retirement funds – they all can make you feel weighed down and stressed. We end up longing for the days we had parents ruling our lives, because all we had to worry about was being a child. We didn’t have to think about whether to heat or eat because we didn’t earn enough that month. We don’t have to worry about paying for educational excursions or making costumes for the latest school play. All we thought about was when we could stay up a little later because it was almost Christmas, and when we could go ice skating with our friends. Getting back in touch with the childhood version of yourself could be exactly what you need in 2018 to throw off a little of that adult stress and invite a little more fun into your life. It’s easier to have fun with things when you have children of your own, as they bring their own piece of magic in their evolving personalities. However, if you don’t have children, it’s yourself that you have to get back in touch with. There is absolutely no excuse, either, because even if you didn’t have the best childhood on the planet, you were still a child.

Children have hopes and dreams. They believe in magic and mystery and there is fairy dust in their glitter and kisses can magically heal any graze. The reason children believe in so much magic is because they have no idea what it is to be stressed. Escaping adulthood and embracing your inner child has to be something that you give yourself time to do. So, in 2018, you need to look into how you can escape the drudgery of adulthood every now and then. We’ve got some tips below to help you to do exactly that.

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Create A Fun Space

In your home, you make plans to renovate, re-decorate and furnish over and over until your home is exactly how you want it. Have you followed minimalist ideals like this, or old-fashioned, like this? Either way, they’re pretty uniform in terms of their decoration. While uniformity is nice, it’s not bright or fun or relaxed for the most part. You need to have an area of your home that’s not all about synchronicity. It can be a corner of a room if you lack the space, but if you have a small room or den you can use to chill out in, you should. Add a games console, a reading nook, a refrigerator packed full of your favourite drinks and snacks. Add somewhere comfortable to sit or lay back, like the massive beanbag cushions you can find with Fombag. There’s a need for a space to just put away life’s stresses and enjoy being yourself. Fun is essential for living, and it isn’t something that you should forget.

Stop Fretting Over The Weather!

Do you ever do that thing where you check the weather before you head out for the day? We all do it. Every adult looks outside, and their mood can be dictated by whether the sun is shining, or the heavens are opening. It’s time to look outside and smile regardless of what you have planned for the day. Pull on a pair of galoshes and get out into the rain. Jump in the puddles and kick up the splashes. Don’t panic if you get muddy because the only way to get happy when the weather wants to pull you down is to squish and splash and mess around like you’re a child again. Children don’t care if they get wet. They don’t care if they jump in a mud puddle and get their clothes covered in brown splodges. All they care about is giggling! When was the last time you got caught in the rain and smiled about it?

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Get Back On Your Bicycle.

Do you remember when the most fun times to be had were on your new bike that you got for your birthday? Firing around the neighbourhood and seeing all your friends on their new bikes was an absolute privilege. Well, you probably now spend your time stuck behind the wheel of a car on a long commute or you’re stuck sardined on public transport. Go to the garage, or if you haven’t got one now, a local store, and get on your bike! Start cycling again to work and to the nearby mall. Stick fun stickers on your helmet and remember what it felt like to be in control of your method of getting to your destination. You don’t just reconnect with the child version of you, you get fit at the same time!

Be With The Kids

When you have children, you can easily get in touch with your inner child. Booking a vacation to Disneyland is just as exciting as an adult as it was when you were a child. Heading to the local park and getting on the swings yourself instead of just pushing the kids can inject some laughter into your life again. Making the time to turn away from work and adult stress to get down on the floor and build Lego, play with Playdoh and even just to talk to your children can turn years back for you. Children have an innocence, a magic, that adults just don’t get to see anymore. Once you get to know your children again, you get to know yourself in a way you didn’t realise that you could. See the world through their eyes, and you can reconnect with the child you used to be.

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A Day In The Life

Imagine yourself as a twelve-year-old. What music did you like? What was your favourite film? What was your go-to comfort food? Whatever the answer to those questions are, take yourself back. Give yourself a day to step into your DeLorean and relive a day that your twelve-year-old self would have loved. Dance crazily to the music that you would have listened to. Watch that film with your favourite snacks and drinks. Read a teen novel that you were obsessed with and do it all with total abandon. Your life is going to massively improve when you realise that you can still do all the things that you did as a child, except without the rules your parents gave you. And there’s also wine if you want it!

Unplug

The one thing that most people remember about being a child is the lack of screens. Sure, we nearly all had a television, a radio and some kind of games console, but mostly we went outside when the sun came up and went home long enough for food, drinks, and when the sun went down again. We rarely sponged in front of the television, because bored children meant our parents found us chores to do. Turn off your smartphone, tablet and computer. Turn away from the internet and learn to be without the screen time you rely on so much. Facebook is the empty fridge: looking inside it every fifteen minutes isn’t going to change anything. Put it away, go outside and enjoy nature. Go and do something else that makes you happy and do it with abandon.

 

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Your adult life isn’t necessarily boring, but it’s far fuller with rules than your childhood ever was. The list above could be infinite, as there are so many things that your childhood self would be doing that we no longer do as adults. Hair mascara, crimping and bright blue mascara aside, childhood was amazing and it’s up to us to continue to find our inner child and embrace them wholeheartedly. Don’t allow yourself to be bogged down in adult drama all the time. Adulthood doesn’t have to be so stressful, and you can choose to see the magic if only you look a little closer.