I called my father one Sunday morning, on my family’s drive home from church. He asked how the Carolina Panthers were doing, and I said I hadn’t been paying close attention. This was something my 10-year-old son, Jack, found shocking. “Coming home from church, eating lunch and spending the afternoon watching football is the sixth-best feeling in the world,” he stated matter-of-factly.

The observation raised many questions, beginning with: What are the world’s top five feelings? As often happens with children, the ensuing conversation...

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I called my father one Sunday morning, on my family’s drive home from church. He asked how the Carolina Panthers were doing, and I said I hadn’t been paying close attention. This was something my 10-year-old son, Jack, found shocking. “Coming home from church, eating lunch and spending the afternoon watching football is the sixth-best feeling in the world,” he stated matter-of-factly.

The observation raised many questions, beginning with: What are the world’s top five feelings? As often happens with children, the ensuing conversation moved quickly. I was able to ascertain only that rising on Christmas morning held the top spot, while waking to an unexpected snow came in at No. 3.

This got me thinking. Even without knowing what No. 2 was, there was a precipitous drop-off between his favorite and third-favorite experiences. The surprise of an overnight snow, pleasant as it is, seemed even more fleeting than the snow itself. And why does the kid derive so much joy on waking?

Then I realized what he does differently. At some point I became a preoccupied adult and let comparison, as the saying goes, become the thief of joy. My son’s rankings are incidental to the experiences themselves, an afterthought. It is why he blithely rattles off so many “best of” lists.

By reflecting just enough but not too much, Jack’s memory measuring never devolves into comparison, and joy remains undiminished. The cynic, as Oscar Wilde put it, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Absence of cynicism, a lost treasure, is what I must rediscover.

The opening couplet of “Rock Me to Sleep,” Elizabeth Akers Allen’s elegiac poem, tells me how: “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight!” Amen.

Mr. Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, N.C.

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