“People do not quit playing because they grow old. They grow old because they quit playing.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- How often are you really “In the Moment” with your experiences? How would your life be enriched by being more present to the moment?
Plato said, “Life must be lived as play.” Many of the philosophical and religious traditions (ie. Zen) stress the value of living more fully in the moment. You may have heard people say, “Be Here Now!” When you think about it, “now” is all you really have, and life is a series of “nows.” But most of us spend our time caught up in upsets and disappointment about the past, or anxieties about the future. Some people even go through life asleep, with no real joy or passion of any kind. In the film, “Awakenings”, Leonard says at one point, “We don’t know what it’s like to live. We’ve forgotten how to experience joy.”
Make a Joy list of things you have fun doing and do two them each day. Doing things that are fun puts you into a playful mood. So do one thing in the morning and one thing in the evening. And keep your Joy list with you at all times as a positive reminder of why your here.
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Filed under: Creativity, Humor, Improv, Play
I fully agree and yet I would like to throw in a word of caution. Play needs a trusted environment, where only pro-child values rule and are self-explanatory. Indeed that is how half of all people keep on behaving all of their lives. Even when they become leaders, they continue operating in protected environments exclusively. Their playmates serve to keep others from the playing grounds by cronyism and nepotism. Then obviously self-criticism and ethics never got a chance to kick in, and that is what I desperately want to prevent.