Playing: Not just for kids?

I’ve been rereading The Happiness Project for my book club and I’m at the bit where Gretchen is trying to instigate more play in her life.

Playing? As serious, professional, grown up adults? Yep. And we should all be doing more of it in my opinion.

I’ve been thinking about play a lot lately, not least because I still have three weeks of summer holidays left and the kids are starting to get googly eyed with boredom. I want to find things that we all enjoy doing together, not grudgingly dragging them along to the park because I feel that’s what I should enjoy.

Having kids is a great excuse to play but so often it’s the only time adults allow themselves to do it. Grown-ups get so hung up on the idea of value; value for money, value for time. What we spend our precious free time on needs to be valuable, something that needs to be done or at the very least it should be a legitimate recreational activity, and if we actually enjoy it that is just a bonus. But maybe many of us have simply forgotten what we truly enjoy doing.

I said to the man this morning “I’m thinking of giving up my blog. I’m not getting many comments; people aren’t engaging in it, I don’t know if people are enjoying it.” “Hold up,” he said. “You started this blog for YOU, for fun, for an opportunity to write, why are you suddenly getting hung up on other people?” He is right of course. As the months have gone on, and in the process of trying to be a better writer, I had taken the joy out of something I was doing purely for the fun of it. I put a lot of hours into my blog and my grown-up brain was starting to look for some added value, totally forgetting that the value comes in the sheer fun of writing it, if one person reads it and enjoys it, it should be considered a bonus, not a reason to do it. 

The man says that he loved working with cars, until he became a mechanic. That’s probably true for many people and their jobs. But maybe that’s less about not enjoying the work, and more about forgetting why we chose to do something in the first place, because we enjoy it. We’re looking for that value again.

Anyway, back to playing. Watching my kids play totally unconcerned with value inspires me to play myself. They don’t care about getting money or recognition or “getting things done because they need to be”. They don’t even think about it.

As adults many of us play games consoles, do crosswords or Sudoku in our free time. All legitimate play options for adults, they encourage fine motor skills, keep the brains working, some console games could even be considered physical exercise. But one of the things I love is those mosaic sticker books. I haven’t had one since I was a child but recently I have begun to crave the quiet pleasure of neatly sticking little coloured squares into dedicated boxes to create a funky picture. I eventually found one online. My mouse has been hovering over “add to cart” for weeks now, I just can’t seem to justify spending £3 on something that is actually just a “toy” (and not even one for the kids). Why? There is nothing wrong with a 33 year old enjoying sticker mosaics, or colouring in for that matter (as long as it’s with nice pens and on good quality white paper, there is very little fun to be had with broken crayons and scratchy grey paper). What makes Sudoku, crosswords or Xbox any more “legitimate” than mosaic stickers? Why should I care anyway?

If someone had said to me 6 months ago that they were trying to play more I would have said how lucky they were to have time to spend on something so decadent. I think there is a certain amount of martyrdom that comes with being an adult, especially a parent. We all think we should be spending our time ‘working’. Childhood was time for fun, adulthood is time to get serious and stop wasting time.

But playing isn’t wasting time, it’s a serious business. Just ask son number one, he quite often tells me he has to get his playing done, it’s his ‘job’. I’m lucky enough to be working my way into a job that I also consider ‘playing’ and I hope I can retain this sense of fun as my career progresses. In the meantime, my mosaic sticker book has finally found its way into my shopping cart.