Rabbi Harold Kushner is blessed with wisdom that I admire. I have read several of his books and he touches my mind and soul. I like what he says here about fun. Affluence seeks constant entertainment at the expense of learning responsibility. I think about my teenage experiences now and am grateful that I was tall and homely and didn't date. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. At the time It gave me a lot of pain and disappointment to be the wallflower. I had girlfriends and we had fun but the ideal was the Friday night date and the Prom. Now I see the wisdom in having time to grow up, to go to college, to develop some hobbies and skills and to gain spiritual strength. Many of the girls I knew who dated young ended up divorced with a life altering dilema. My life with love and security was worth the wait.

"Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course. It can be a very welcome change of pace from things we do every day, but should it ever become what we do every day, we will find it too frivolous a base to build a life on. I think of all the people I knew (and envied) in high school whose lives seemed to be so much more full of fun than mine—the athletes, the good-looking, smooth-talking students, the first ones to have serious boyfriends or girlfriends. We all envied them back then, because their lives seemed to be one long party, one fun experience after another. Neither they nor we could have known back then that a life of constant pleasure during those teenage years almost inevitably sets one up for a life of frustration afterward. There are skills not acquired, habits not formed, and lessons about the real world not learned during those years of having everything go smoothly for you…Will someone to whom things came effortlessly in youth ever learn the disciplines of patience and postponing gratification, or will that person be unprepared for the day when the music stops and people start saying no." (Rabbi Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 69-70)