The Importance of Play
When was the last time you played? I mean really played like when you were a child.
Without any agenda or goal.
Without purpose.
Just for fun.
To enjoy time by yourself or with siblings or friends without any particular idea or plan of what you were doing.
This is something that is missing from our modern (shall I say “adult”?) lives: time to be bored and to choose what to do spontaneously in the moment.
It’s really hard to create this because we’ve scheduled our lives so completely. There’s always something we “need” to do or that we “should be” doing. We are indoctrinated into the way of thinking that says action needs to have a goal, a purpose; that it can’t be spontaneous and free and simply curious.
I recently shared with my friend David Taylor-Klaus about a client of mine who had to schedule “unscheduled time” into her calendar because every moment of every day for months was planned with some activity. Ok, not the worst idea since we do tend to fill our calendars with activities, but it does represent a deep irony of our times that we need to block out time to do nothing, to play, to be spontaneous, or be bored.
Are we afraid to be bored? Where do you think creativity comes from?
The state of mind of play is critical to our well-being and an essential aspect of self-care. It promotes creativity and reduces stress. It frees us from the constant “DO-ing” that separates us from the world and leaves us feeling disconnected from those around us.
When I talk about play, I simply mean freeing yourself from being beholden to tasks and work or to the feeling there is something you should be doing. It’s about being spontaneous in the moment. Dropping the “I need to or I’m supposed to be doing X, Y, or Z” and embracing “I can do whatever I want in this moment. What do I want to do right now? What is my deepest desire for my life in this moment?”
As as my mother always said, “There are no supposed-to’s.”
Wise words, mom. Wise words.
Let me tell you an inspiring story which is a great real-life example of how play can change your world and lead to results in your life that can astound you.
If you think playing and having fun are not important for generating your future, consider the following story about one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman:
“[Feynman] was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant it seemed to him—or was it his physicist's intuition? —that the two rotations were related. He had told himself he was going to play, so he tried to work the problem out on paper. It was surprisingly complicated…
He showed Bethe what he had discovered.
But what's the importance of that? Bethe asked.
It doesn't have any importance, he said. I don't care whether a thing has importance. Isn't it fun?
It's fun, Bethe agreed.
Feynman told him that was all he was going to do from now on—have fun.”
- James Gleick, “Genius – The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” (Pantheon Books, New York, 1992), p. 227-228
Richard Feynman
You have to know that Feynman is considered one of the top scientists of all time and the 7th most important physicist ever and at the time this happened was in a frustrating rut where he seemed unable to produce anything new. This released him from that stagnant rut his work had been in and led ultimately to receiving the Nobel Prize.
Here’s how Feynman describes this moment in his memoirs:
“I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it… the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”
- Richard Feynman
This is a powerful example of a truly great mind that got un-stuck through creativity and play and being curious about the world around.
Imagine what you could create in your life by incorporating play and spontaneity into your life and relationships!
Stop. Get curious. Get interested. Explore. Discover. Treat yourself to the freedom to play. Take time to be bored.
What does play look like in your life?
As tempting as it is to create a list of the 5 to 10 ways that you can start generating play in your life, that would be really ironic: following a list of rules for how to stop following the rules 😂
How about this: you tell me the thing you did today that was play or that created free spontaneous activity. I would love to hear about it 🙂
