Remember those holidays when you did "nothing"? It was not like you did nothing but there was nothing to report except for sheer joy, a few lessons learnt from what happened (scraping a knee on a slippery mound teaches us to be more careful the next time) a few idle dreams of the future (Could I live among the stars? What fun it would be if i could breathe under water like a fish!), all of which added up to a big "Nothing" when some one asked what we did.
This nothing however, is the base for a lot of lifeskills including taking control of our own lives later on in life, say experts. Doing equal excelling is slowly becoming the mantra for many children's lives. Report cards crowd lives from as early as Pre- kindergarten and morph into performance appraisals in adulthood. But what about just being and doing for the sheer joy of it? Our lives are overschedulled from a very young age and we beccome dependent on that scheduling. So how do you give imagination a full run? Its not easy in this world we live in. There is a lot of pressure to be the best at everything and we all like to believe we can control most things in our life. But control may be diminishing the joy that kids can experience in their childhood say experts.
Early retirement with days full of leisure and activities we love is a universal dream for us.