The Playful Spirit and Openness to the New
Mix the futile with hope and you will have the color yellow and its radiant joy.
These words came to me and I decided we are stuck in judgment as a collective. Social media keeps us glued to judgment. Yet it’s more than environmental influences. We assess the world to be a certain way and the assessment becomes a stance. We become rigid. The cast is set.
We live in grim, bleak times, we say. We wear leaden boots without even realizing we have them on our feet, weighing us down, keeping us in place, preventing levity, light-heartedness, joviality, and nimble poise.
That’s where the conversation ends: bleak, grim, troubled, difficult times. We park the car right there.
We see a page before us; we draw our dark assessments; we put the markers down and draw no more.
We fail to notice we could have wondered about hope. We don’t realize we could take off the leaden boots and give our bodies more possibilities for movement, speed and direction. The yellow and its radiance is not only omitted from our representation of the world we live in, but it also goes unseen, unfelt, undetected.
Play and its companions, curiosity and wonder, can help us get unstuck. Playfulness invites the imagination to ask, “What if there’s more to life than what you’ve decided there is?”
Some of us are lucky to have jobs that allow us to play, to bring new ideas or fresh approaches to the task or project. And some of us aren’t quite so lucky in that regard and may want to find places in our lives where we can tap into the spirit of playfulness.
Listen to your cat next time she is sitting in your lap. What does she know about living the good life that you’re not seeing as you go about your day?
Allow yourself to improvise next time you’re in the kitchen. Give yourself permission to tap into your intuition. Tell yourself it’s not the end of the world if the meal is a disaster. Be bold in creating a new combo of veggies in your medley.
This is the freedom we all need. And we are the only ones who can give this gift of freedom to ourselves. Give yourself permission to explore, experiment, to go beyond the routines, to stretch the narrow confines of the familiar and the comfort zone.
See what life feels like when the same old same old heavy boots are shed. This might bring a sense of freedom, relief, or renewal. Now you are free to discover there is more to who you are than you believed.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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