What did you love doing when you were 6 years old?

Today I am going to talk about things that we loved doing back when we were kids like six years old and why it is important for us today as adults.  You see when a child like six years old was very fond let’s say of drawing right? I for example loved drawing and right up until maybe seventh or eighth grade I participated with my parents in summer camps where the students also drew and I was required to also draw together with them because my both parents at that time were both teachers of art.  So I also was surrounded by art at home and I was basically creating, drawing all the time.

My favorite drawing theme was probably horses and airplanes I think too.  So I remember that up until maybe thirteen years old. And then I stopped drawing somehow maybe because I had to choose music more, maybe because nobody else from my class drew at that time so basically I wanted to belong, I didn’t want to stand out and I forgot about drawing for a long time.  But only three years ago approximately I started to feel the urge of drawing. And even before that I was very envious of artists, of visual artists who expressed their creativity in a visual way. Either in photography or creating pictures, paintings, drawings, sculptures.

Anything that is visual was still very appealing to me although I didn’t practice this for many years, let’s say from thirteen years old right up until mayben thirty-eight or thirty-nine years old.  You see how many years have passed. Many, many decades and I still didn’t forget about that. And I remember starting drawing little by little after reading Linda Berris book called “Syllabus.” And this book inspired me to start drawing comics.  

My very first public drawing was created on the occasion of international Churlonis organ and piano competition.  I was sitting in the church I remember back in 2015 in September and I started to draw monsters and they were asking many things, saying many things I was hearing in people's music when they played the organ upstairs in the balcony.  And it was sort of my commentary in terms of comics. I didn’t know how to draw organ or people at the time and still don’t know very well. But it seemed to me like monsters was something like what I could draw easily. And I started drawing those monsters and sharing them on Facebook.  I was so scared at that time and actually was thrilled when organist Hans-Ola Ericsson liked one of my drawings of monsters with the commentary. And I thought maybe it’s not a mortal sin I’m doing right now and maybe I can continue if such a great organist clicked “like” on that drawing.  So I continued drawing up until this day. Illustrations, comics, and right now Pinky and Spiky comics. It’s really fascinating to me.

But why am I talking about this, right?  Because the love of drawing followed me from the time I was six years old and I came back to this love just quite recently.  Three years ago. Which means that for you if you look at your childhood back when you were six, seven, eight years old maybe up until eleven, twelve, or even thirteen years old.  You will no doubt discover something very curious about yourself. What you loved to do. Maybe you not only drew, maybe you danced, maybe you created music, maybe you wrote poetry.  Those activities generally are very applicable for majority of children, right?

And most of the children laugh much more than that.  So adults laugh five times a day on average, and children laugh three hundred times a day on average and on average we can safely say that children are happier and we can safely say that laughing more would lead us to happiness.  But not only laughing probably and I think a big part of being a child is immersing yourself in these activities that we love, right? In my case it was drawing and not only drawing, I loved to conduct and pretend I am a conductor and I took my Mom’s brush and I was conducting Mozart’s 40th Symphony in G Minor and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.  That was my favorite too. So music was also part of my childhood too. And definitely I am a musician right now so I never stopped doing this. But drawing I did stop and it was like some part of me was missing and when recently I came back to this activity I felt much more united in myself.

I cannot say that everything is whole right now in my being but much more united that before, before I took up drawing.  So if you look at your activities when you were a child and see if you could discover some missing part of you that you are longing to do this right now.  Maybe you don’t have the skill, maybe you don’t have the time, maybe you don’t have the tools, right?. It doesn’t matter, right? You can come back to this activity today.  However childish it appears to you or others, it doesn’t matter how others react. I think this having hobby today is very beneficial to your well-being as a person, as a whole.  And your spiritual well-being too. So I challenge everyone who is listening and who will be listening to this in the future to think about the childhood memories you did and took up those activities.  Maybe you could experiment with those activities today. Little by little come back to that feeling of happiness you had as a child.

I hope you will create something and share it with the world because when you create miracles happen.