What do you do for an encore?

 You are ten years old. You have two homes equipped with pools and tennis courts and gyms.. You have never had a vacation where you were not chronically entertained. There is tennis and swimming and soccer and ballet. There is skiing in the Rockies, and you have been to Europe several times. When the weekend arrives, there are more classes, endless playdates. You don't know what it means to play alone, have no plans, be bored.

A friend of mine who teaches in school knows so many clones of this child; she teaches them. She thinks about her own child; she is a single parent without unlimited resources.  It is not the experience of her child, who sometimes waits for her at the gym while she takes a class. He is sometimes bored, but he is also resourceful. Her experience of raising a child is so different then the students she teaches. She knows it is okay to be bored and figure it out. Vacation is not always a signal to go away. 

She is raising a resilient, resourceful child who knows life is sometimes (often) about doing nothing and figuring it out. LESS IS MORE, but affluent parents sometimes just don't get it. The problem with chronic entertainment and extravagance is that is what will be expected in adulthood. There is nothing to grow into. There is no world to be discovered, since these children have done it all.

What do you do for an encore when you have done it all?  Of course, there are always more exotic places to travel to at twenty and thirty and beyond, but here is something to be said about the discovery of the world you never knew as a child because your family did not have the time or resources. You can grow into an adult who has a whole, wide world in front of you. You can be creative because you have had unlimited time to dapple in the arts. There is a lot to do as an encore. Including doing absolutely nothing and all, aside from, perhaps, being a good person.