RECLAIM PLAY BY KATI BUCHHEIT

I bet you were once a curious young explorer conquering the nearby woods or a monkey climbing to the very top of the playground just so you could feel like you were on top of the world. As kids, we played constantly.  We relied on our imagination and curiosity to make sense of the world around us.

But as we grew up, we lost this curiosity; this spontaneity; this creative freedom.

As young adults, play is low on our list of priorities. We live in a world that’s more conducive to anxiety than playfulness. In the never-ending to-do list of adulthood, play can feel like a waste of time. We exhaust ourselves with tasks we should or have to do, but we rarely have time or energy for activities we want to do. Is that really how we want to live our lives?

I propose that in this moment, we decide to reclaim play. We decide to let go and think about play as an action we do that brings us a significant amount of joy, not something that offers a specific result.

There’s nothing hard about being playful. What is hard is letting yourself play; recognizing the opportunity and accepting the invitation. Playfulness is all about yielding to the moment and not always relying on a perfect plan or a certain outcome. When we allow ourselves to live as authentically playful beings, we stand out from the crowd, from the ways we, and others, are expected to be.