Fearless Guides eZine

Ideas, Inspiration, and Practices for living joyously in a fear-based world.

Time for Play

As summer approaches, are you giving yourself permission to play on a daily basis? Or are you eagerly awaiting your summer vacation?

Do you know how to play? I mean real, serious focused play. The kind of play that young children do if given the time and space for it. Where you don't worry about time or if you have worked enough hours that day or made enough money or if your house is clean enough. I mean play where time stands still.

When is that last time that you played? We have been trained in our culture to value work and to devalue play. Ideally, if you discover work that is suited to your being, work will feel like play. But, if you have forgotten how to play or learned that you cannot give yourself permission to play, then you may not give yourself permission to do work you enjoy.

Here is my definition of play: Play is self-directed, instrinsically motivated, and open ended.

I think that we live in a society that is quite anti-play. It seems that play is OK for the very young child, but at a certain point one must stop frivolous play and attend to other things – academic achievement, sports competition, musical mastery, etc.

As the mother of a 3-year old, I have had the opportunity to interact with other parents and attend classes for toddler and pre-school children. What I have observed is that many of us believe that play is frivolous and not valuable and the domain of the very young child. At the heart of these attitudes is the belief that play is a waste of time. I see it everyday with well-meaning parents. They believe that children up to the age of three or so should be allowed to play all day, but after that, they need to get serious, start following the rules, and start learning

Our society loves activities that are structured around goals. There is a pernicious belief that the sooner you start, the sooner you finish. Academic training at a young age is about giving children a competitive edge in our competitive economy. It is about winning the race. But life is not a competition or a race. Living as if it is leads to deep dissatisfaction, lack of meaning, and depression.

Jane Healy, a Colorado-based psychologist, educator and author of Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It says, "Adults have really lost touch with the basic needs of the child. It's parenting as product development," she said. "Everything about children's lives these days seems to be so serious, and play looks like it's not valuable enough. But most of the very highly creative and successful people in the long run are adults who can still adopt a playful attitude toward ideas. I just don't think parents -- or even policy-makers -- understand that children's spontaneous, self-generated play has tremendous potential to actually enhance brain development and increase kids' intelligence and academic ability."

Through play and improvisation, you learn who you really are. As musician Stephen Nachmanovitch says, " Spontaneous creation comes from our deepest being and is immaculately and originally ourselves. What we have to express is already with us, is us, so the work of creativity is not a matter of making the material come, but of unblocking the obstacles to its natural flow."

If you feel stuck in your life or career, play is a great way to get in touch with your inner self and find your direction.

June's Cure for Fear: Play Every Day!

Give yourself permission to do something that you enjoy every day without worrying about the outcome of your activity. Make sure that your play is: self-directed, instrinsically motivated, and open ended.

Does golf, cooking, and gardening count as play? Well, it depends. I look to Stephen Nachmanovitch and his wonderful book, Free Play, again for a clear destinction between play and games.

"Play is always a matter of context. It is not what we do, but how we do it...The mood of play can be impish or supremely solemn. When the most challenging labors are undertaken from the joyous work spirit, they are play. In play we manifest fresh, interactive ways of relating with people, animals, things, ideas, images, ourselves...

To play is to free ourselves from artibrary restrictions and expand our field of action. Our play fosters richness of response and adaptive flexibility. This is the evolutionary value of play - play makes us flexible. By reinterpreting reality and begetting novelty, we keep from becoming rigid. Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways.

"Play" is different from "game." Play is the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for its own pure joy. Game is an actitivy defined by a set of rules, like baseball, sonnet, symphony, diplomacy. Play is an attitude, a spirit, a way of doing things, whereas game is a defined activity with rules and a playing field and participants."

How do you want to play today? Do you want to play alone or with a friend? I play every day with my daughter and I play myself when I work joyously on a new idea or business. I am completely fired up about a new company that I want to launch and this is play for me.

Inspirations for June

Here are some ideas that help me to play and improvise:

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

-- Carl Jung

“The free play of creativity is not the ability to artibrarily manipulate life. It is the ability to experience life as it is. The experience of existence is a feflection of Being , which is beauty and consiousness. Free play is that which makes this experience accessible to the individual.”

-- Stephen Nachmanovitch

" You can't learn by studying "subjects" the way they are organized in schools. In the new century, people will need to be good problem solvers and model builders, and they must be able to play, communicate - and I would add - be confident and feel empowered; that's where freedom comes in."

-- Daniel Greenberg

Go forth and prosper!,

Debra Thorsen

Personal and Professional Coach

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