Let’s Play

I just finished an audio book by Brené Brown. She’s not new to me, I’ve liked her insights for a while. I think of her as a “behaviorist”, if there is such a word. She looks at things we all do, what makes us happy, what makes us less than happy. What we might do to make our lives contain more of the happy and less of the not happy. One of the things she talks about is the importance of play. For kids as well as adults. Play………………as in not working at your job. Play can be lots of different things. Playing the piano or making time to read. Lying on the sofa and listening to the wind chimes. Spending family time in a game of Uno  All sorts of things that are not treated competitively. Your kid’s soccer game is not play. It’s organized, sometimes highly so. There’s a winner and there’s a loser. Zero sum. Completely different than drawing on the sidewalk with chalk or a game of hopscotch afterwards. A trip to Disneyland, while unmistakably a treat, is not necessarily play. I remember our family trip to Disney World when our kids were something like 9, 10, and 12. We waited until they were old enough to remember it and to enjoy things without us having to carry them if they got tired. We bought a two-day family pass, which was totally affordable at the time. I loved the rides but mostly had to drag myself from attraction to attraction. I’m not someone who enjoys lines and I tire easily and reach sensory overload quickly. So we got to the end of the first day and everyone seemed to be pretty happy. Repeat on the second day, with different attractions at nearby Expo. The moment I realized that this didn’t qualify as “play” for any of us, was when we got to the exit and one of our sons asked, “Do we have to come back here again tomorrow?” Two of our grandchildren spent a week with us before we moved to live closer to them two years ago.  We did a lot of running around. We had fun on the carousel and rode on the gondola ride over the waterfall downtown. We bought silly stuff. We ate at their favorite places and played games at home. When their parents came to pick them up afterwards, they asked the kids what was the favorite thing we’d done. They said, “Sitting outside at night and looking at the stars to try and find constellations.”

Photo courtesy kaboompics at Pixsbay.com