When we were young, we had no trouble playing. We did it all the time. We did not even have a word for it – that was just how we lived. Life was play – we enjoyed every moment of it and we did not differentiate between one activity and another: it was just one joyful, spherical whole.
But then we went to school, to college, to university, to work… and somewhere along the way, some of us forgot how to play. We learnt to do things we called play, like playing sport, which often hurt, playing up, which ended up with a hangover and all sorts of other bad side-effects (or as I like to call them, effects!) and playing golf, which in some opinions, is just an expensive way to spoil a good walk.
But is all of this really play? Does it make us feel joyful, vital, and restore and revive us? And if not, how can we learn to truly play again? What is play, anyway?
Interestingly, we use the word play in many different ways.
allow a fish to exhaust itself pulling against a line before reeling it in.
And that is just the verbs!
light and constantly changing movement.
The word comes from the Old English 'plegian' meaning 'to exercise', or 'plega' 'brisk movement' and or from the Middle Dutch 'pleien', meaning 'leap for joy, dance'.
As we have 'grown up', it feels like we have lost the childhood wonder of 'leaping for joy and dancing' and somehow learned that we had to substitute that with 'exercise or brisk movement,' which often feels like just more hard work!
So what would it look and feel like to learn to truly play again?
Clearly, we cannot just walk around in our work clothes leaping about and dancing, because that would look crazy and no-one would take us seriously or come near us, but what can we do?
Is it even about 'doing' anything, or is it more about a quality of 'being' that we can bring to our day?
Can we live and work in a way that is playful all the time? Can we see the joy and wonder in everyday life, so that every day is play again?
And if not, what has gotten in the way? We used to live like this when we were little – who said life had to be serious as we grew big?
This describes more the quality of how we can be as we live our day – a quality of lightness, of freedom, of spaciousness – that we can take with us, wherever we go, into all of our daily activities.
If we move with this feeling – which is all that playfulness truly is – then everything we do can feel light and playful, no matter how intense it is technically or physically. We can restore the joy and wonder of just being in a body and living life, and work and play can become a graceful, spherical whole – which we used to just know as 'life' when we were young.
Perhaps this is the key to living life in full and ageing grace-fully – learning to play again!