Practicing Playfulness
OK. OK. There’s no argument here. Sometimes, sometimes often, asking yourself to be playful is just asking too much of yourself. Even asking yourself to act as if you were feeling playful when you’re just not at all by any stretch of anything feeling anything like playful is, more often than not, asking too much.
It’s been a long time, you say to yourself, since you were or felt or acted playful, especially here, in this place, with these people. And even though I know it would be the very best way for me to act and feel, that it would make the people around me feel and act playful, that it would lessen the tension and boredom and general angst of it all, it’s been too long. I can’t even pretend.
I’m sorry you feel that way. And I’m sure you are too. But there’s no denying your feelings. So, what to do? What to do?
Let’s start with something I’ve been recently advising people in situations like yours – recently, as in the last 45 years.
Practice. Practice, so you can remind yourself what it feels like, what you are like when you’re being playful. So you can experience yourself experiencing it.
No. I’m not saying that you should, you know, make jokes in the operating room or do magic tricks when giving somebody a ticket.
You can’t practice playfulness when you’re all caught up in the daily game, so to speak, doing things you really care about, when things are really tense, and have consequences.
You need things that don’t matter. Things you just don’t care about winning or losing or being good at or impressing people with or demonstrating your real self in. You need things you don’t have to do, things people do for, you know, fun.
Like play games. Games.
Games are all about play. Though they’re not necessarily all about playfulness, at all. That’s what you’re about. Most games are about winning. There’s a score that needs to be kept. And in keeping score, there’s the implication that it’s important to to be the one with the higher score. More important even than fun.
So you need a game you can play playfully. With people who are also playing playfully; who are also not taking the game or each other towards anything or anywhere bordering on seriousness. A game very much, if not exactly like, Mondo Croquet. “It’s Croquet,” the inventors proclaim, “American Style with bowling balls and sledgehammers!” And costumes, too. I mean, how bad can you feel about losing a game of croquet in the first place? And how close to actually good will you feel when you’re playing with bowling balls and sledgehammers? In costume? Everything about the game and the players proclaims playfulness.
And it’s not the only such game. Here, from the archives, are further examples:
- Mega Soccer
- Bocce Drift
- Free Form Frisbee Golf
- Debauchery Ball
- Subversive Golf
- Urban Golf
- Shore Shoes
- Free Bowl
In further fact, all the games in the deepFUN.com collection are recommended for that self-same sole reason. They are all invitations to playfulness – all opportunities for you to remind yourself how playful you are, and always have been.
