Watching kids play literally improves my mood and makes me happy. It reminds me of a bygone era without too many responsibilities or too much stress. I live not

Watching kids play literally improves my mood and makes me happy. It reminds me of a bygone era without too many responsibilities or too much stress. I live not far away from a public park with a small playground; sometimes when I am tired of coding I take a short walk there, watch the kids for a bit and come back refreshed. Kids are so energetic, but somehow the sight and sound of kids playing can impart energy to me. Vladimir Nabokov had a beautifully written description of kids playing: > What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. (In the novel the protagonist abused Lolita and was feeling remorseful for robbing her of a proper childhood playing with other kids.)