Hey, quick note before we jump in. This episode is still safe for little ears all the way through, except for one brief mention of adult play. You know, the married grownups kind. If you're listening with kids in the car, you might want headphones for about 10 seconds around the middle or just know it's coming and goes by fast. Totally up to you. Either way, let's dive in. Do you remember when you were a kid and you used to play with your friends, with your toys or your imagination or outside, and you would just absolutely lose yourself in whatever game you were playing. Do you remember how time meant? Nothing you had nowhere else to be. You knew that someone was gonna come and tell you when it was time to stop and you had to go and eat dinner or whatever else you were supposed to do that night. So you could literally completely lose yourself in whatever you were doing, whether you were out in the woods with sticks and playing, I don't know, sword fighting. My house growing up, backed up to woods and we would go out in the woods, especially if it was like a windy day. And we would pretend there was some kind of, storm coming, like hurricane or something coming and we had to like madly run around and prepare for the storm and we would grab handfuls of acorns and plants pretend to build a fire, pretend to build a shelter. We would do this for hours. It was so much fun. I don't even know how long we would do it for. I could have done it all day long. I remember that every time it was time to stop, I could have kept going for equally as long as we had already been doing it. Or Barbies. Look, I think it may still be true. I'm 44 years old. I think maybe still to this day, I have spent more time, more hours playing Barbies than maybe anything else I've ever done in my life. my best friend, Jenny and I, she lived across the street. She used to come over to my house every single day in the summertime and most days after school, whenever we could, and we would sit in my room. My room had two windows and each window was Set into a little alcove. So we would each take an alcove and we would design these houses for these Barbies. that was my favorite part. I would take cassette tape cases and like stack them up like staircases and I would stack up big books to make upstairs, and it was the most fun. That was something I could have done indefinitely and never gotten bored with it ever. We used to fight over who would get the fancy telephone or who would get the. whatever the item was that day that we both decided we wanted so much fun. Children are geniuses at playing. Adults are kind of garbage at playing It's a combination of, I think we lose interest in it, like it becomes uncool when you become, a tween or a teen, like it's just not cool anymore to sit and play with toys or really even to show those parts of yourself, it's vulnerable, right? If you're gonna sit and play and use your imagination and suggest ideas, or you know what might happen next, that's a little bit vulnerable. And I guess when you become a tween or a teen, you're less interested in opening yourself up to any kind of criticism. And then when you become an adult, it just becomes harder. But the more I think about this phase of my life that I'm in, where. I feel like the things that I'm spending my time on or the way that I'm going about, the things that I'm spending my time on are not fulfilling me and my life is lacking color and brightness and fun. The more I think about that, the clearer it becomes. That play is at the center of this issue. that's the problem. We're not playing. We have to track all the time. We have to have this ticker tape of the to-do list in our head, and we have to be so vigilant about making sure we're meeting all of our responsibilities, which are innumerable, So it's so difficult to turn off that part of your brain and just be present and be silly and do things that don't actually have a purpose, that aren't going to earn you money and aren't going to earn you accolades. And just have fun. It's so hard to do that, and I think that's the thing I think that's one of the biggest things that's missing from the way that I am living my everyday life and the way that everybody else around me is living their everyday life. So today on this podcast, we are going to talk about play and we might just play a little bit as we go. I hope we do. I hope you'll join me. This is gonna be a fun one. So I recently left my corporate job and I had been spending my time trying to build a life in color and trying to recover from burnout. And the other day, my 7-year-old son came to me outta the blue and he just said, mom, I really like it when you don't work for your old company because now you play with me Ugh, it was beautiful and I felt proud and happy and connected to him. And also I felt a little bit heartbroken and devastated because I know that's what they want. They want me to play with them, and that tells me I haven't been doing that enough. I'm so happy to be in a point well, with my time, but also with my state of mind where I am open to it. I've been really diligently trying. The second that they come home from school in the afternoon I shut everything down and I go downstairs and I check in with them and sometimes they just wanna sit and watch tv. I get it. They're kind of introverts I get it. Long day at school. Lots of. stimulation and they wanna come home and veg out for a little while. I'm like that. I can't begrudge them that, but sometimes they're like, Hey, you wanna come and play restaurant or you wanna come play tennis or you wanna play cards? And I try to say yes, lately it's an exercise for my own self as well to like turn off the to-do list and try to be present with them When I thought about being a parent, I knew very early on that I wanted to have kids. I always pictured myself as a mom for a very long time. I also wanted to be an elementary school teacher. I just love kids. I wanna be around kids forever. when I pictured myself with kids, I always was playing. I was gonna be the mom that was the most imaginative, fun, playful parent Of anybody else that we knew I was gonna be the one that was the most creative parent. And I am sad to say, I don't think that has been the case. There are so many games that we could have been playing over time. That time just passes. And when I'm busy or trying to spend time on things that fill up my cup in a different way because I'm burned out or exhausted, or just trying to steal some time for myself between tasks. All of a sudden years pass, and here we are. Luckily my youngest son is still, he's only seven, and I feel like there's plenty of time. My older son is 10 and I am worried that he's gonna grow up not knowing this side of me as much. We certainly played, I mean, of course, but my imagination is sort of limitless and I really embrace that part of myself I could have been letting more of that out over the years. I'm setting this goal for myself, both for the betterment of my children, but also for me. I think more for me than anybody else is I'm going to try to play more for the rest of my life. This is important for me for my identity, my internal identity. It's important for me to be a playful, imaginative, creative adult. when we are in burnout and overwhelm, play is equal. Parts the most difficult thing because you have to access a part of your brain that you have not been able to use because you've been so focused on what you have to do. And so it's equal parts difficult, and also I think it's the way out. play is the cure for burnout I don't think it's optional. I don't think we can go through life and be happy if we're not also playing. that's the real cost of this grayness. It steals our ability to play even with our kids, even with the people that we love the most, and that is an absolute tragedy and something we should not let happen. That one sentence that my son said to me absolutely changed something in me. Let's talk about why we lose play. So when you're playing. You're absolutely present, right? You're focused on whatever you want to do. There is no purpose to what you're doing. There is no end game. There's not like a point you're trying to get to unless you're playing a board game, I guess, but you're just present, when you're an adult. You're given a set of responsibilities and usually it's too many responsibilities. It's almost impossible to keep them all straight And for me at least, this could be a little bit my A DHD talking, when I try to play, if I turn off my brain completely, I get scared that I will lose track entirely of something I'm supposed to be doing. Like right now, I'm taking care of my neighbor's cats because they're outta town for vacation, and I get a little worried because it's not a normal response. It's not part of my routine that I will think of naturally. So if I play, if I sit down and I lose myself in whatever I'm doing, will I forget? Will I forget that I'm supposed to go and feed the cats? And of course there's ways around this I have reminders on my phone, but it does occur to me, and that reminds me, that's why this is difficult. We're taught to be responsible as adults, we're taught to be efficient, and those things get in the way of imagination because imagination by definition is not efficient. And it's irresponsible. I can imagine all kinds of irresponsible things right this second. We start to believe that play is frivolous. we just don't have time to be doing things that don't have a purpose because we have to do all of these things that do have a purpose. You know, in Mary Poppins, the Dad is in my mind what we have all become as adults. He has forgotten completely how to imagine how to play, how to appreciate creativity. He is just focused on the task at hand and being responsible and having a tidy little life. Everything in its place. That's, I feel like what we're all becoming, and this is what I am pushing so hard against, like don't lose that appreciation for the beautiful colors in the world. Don't rip up the letter that the little kids wrote, even though it's not perfectly worded. That's from the movie. Watch Mary Poppins. If you haven't seen it, for goodness sake, performance becomes more important than anything else for us as adults, Performance is a tricky word, Performing a role at work becomes more important as an adult. But when I was a kid, I used to perform constantly. I would make my parents sit down and watch, dance routines. I had made up to my, Dirty Dancing soundtrack. That was my favorite dance soundtrack. I would put the tape in and I would do all of these, I'm sure not graceful. Moves and I would make them sit there through like three songs worth of dance routine because I always felt like I was performing. I remember feeling that way, but now I feel like my performances don't actually come from within me. They are me understanding what is expected of me and then performing those roles. In doing that, I am losing touch with my own joy and creativity and frivolity. The life inside of me is not driving what I'm doing every day. I become self-conscious because I know that there is a specific expectation of how I'm supposed to be doing things and what it's supposed to look like, and there will be judgment placed on those things. When I was a kid. I didn't even know that the dance moves that I was doing were different than what maybe somebody might have expected. My parents didn't judge them based on skill. They sat there politely, I'm sure, side eyeing each other and rolling their eyes when I would turn around. But they would applaud and they would cheer, and I felt like the star of the show and the best dancer in the world. That's what play does because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If I'm a good dancer and not a good dancer, I'm enjoying the dance that is the name of the game. We gotta find a way to enjoy the dance. Otherwise, our nervous system is gonna enter permanent work mode and we don't know how to let it down. How do you turn it off so that you can relax? I've had so many days like this where I am. So focused on work and my responsibilities, my nervous system is on edge. this hyper vigilance all the time to make sure I'm not making a mistake and I'm keeping all the plates in the air when I lay down to go to sleep at night. My nervous system stays like that, and so I have stress dreams or I wake up and my to-do list is still ticking through my mind and I can't turn it off. It's work mode. I don't wanna be in that mode. I hate work mode. It doesn't feel good. I can't relax. It takes so much effort for me to calm myself down, to find a point where I can relax and try to go to sleep and maybe have an imaginative dream instead of a stress dream. That takes a lot of effort and sometimes it's just not possible. I hate that feeling, but I think unfortunately the world rewards seriousness, but your soul doesn't. Your soul wants play and joy I feel like that's what my soul says to me all the time. But the world is like, Hey, heads down, finish your task. And then you have these 8,000 other tasks. I also think many of us have stopped playing because no one has ever modeled playfulness as an adult. What does that look like? You don't wanna be the irresponsible one, You don't wanna be the one that's, you know, in church cracking jokes and giggling as a grownup because people might judge you. People might think differently about you. You might miss out on adult opportunities if you're not seen as a responsible, serious person. But I don't know if I care about those things anymore. I don't know how much those actually matter. I can't go out and become one with nature and enjoy a nature walk or a hike through the woods if I'm thinking about work the whole time. And in the grand scheme of things, the nature walk is more important than a day at work? Let's talk about what play actually is What do I mean when I say play? Because I do think it's different for adults and for kids when we're kids. It is a state of fun, but it's also the way that kids are learning about the world around them. It's the way that they are processing difficult things that happen to them. If you pay close attention to your kids when they're playing, they will often act out something that someone said to them at school or something that happened between the two of you. If a loved one dies, the kids might play with their action figures or their dolls in the same way someone might die because they're trying to figure out what do I do with this? How do I process this? So for kids, play is both frivolity and learning. for adults. Sure, there's lots of things we still need to learn, but I think for adults it's more of an expression of curiosity and like loosening up on your identity a little bit. if you're a very serious buttoned up person and I'm asking you to put on a crazy hat and roll around on the floor like you're something that you're not. Those two things might seem diametrically opposed. You might be a little uncomfortable doing that, but we need to free ourselves from whatever the outcome is, give ourselves permission to try new things and loosen that identity a little bit. You don't lose it. It doesn't go away. You're just exploring new parts of yourself, but you're being present in this moment only focused on what feels good. How do you laugh? How do you find the fun? this is a muscle that if we can build it in our free time and we learn how to quickly transition between day mode. That muscle will get stronger and stronger, and maybe it will start to adjust our mindset. Even when we're in task mode. Maybe we'll have a mindset that makes us a little bit more flexible, a little bit less brittle, a little bit more resilient, because we can see the lightness or the fact that every single thing that is happening doesn't matter as much as we think it does. if you really think about it, most jobs that we have are only stressful because we've made it that way. We as humans have made it that way. We've made up a set of rules, we've agreed to these standards that we set for ourselves and for each other. We've made up arbitrary deadlines. And then when we miss these things, it becomes really stressful Somebody once said. This is the way that a document should look when it's finished. This is the way a slideshow should look. And so if you're not able to meet that standard, it becomes stressful. But also, if you're not able to meet that standard, what? What actually happens? Does it actually matter? No. We're pretending all day long. We just don't know it anymore. I think that play becomes a way to see difficult situations from new angles, we put people up on pedestals. People who become, high ranking executives, high ranking officials, president of the United States world leaders, actors, and actresses For whatever reason, we put them up on pedestals and then we meet them and we feel less than, or we feel intimidated or we get flustered. But why? They are also still just your average human being who happened to step onto a path that led them to where they are. And so if we can stop taking things too seriously. I think we connect with each other on a different level it's a shortcut to authenticity. And then we can step into an elevator with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and maybe have a giggle with him or her. we could run into a celebrity and Make them smile, smile back at them like humans. I think play is anything you do for joy, anything you do for joy and anything you do that is not for achievement is play for me lately as an adult, I have found that I. Research. This is part of my play because I'll think of a topic or I'll come across a topic that I find really interesting and I just want to dive in the same way that I did with the Barbies, right? I wanna dive in so deep. I just want to immerse myself in that topic and learn everything. And in doing so, I'm imagining myself as a different person. So I've talked a little bit about herbal medicine And just herbal tea that I've been into lately. So someone gifted me a book that had a bunch of tea recipes in it, a beautiful little and I had never been exposed to any kind of medicinal tea before. I had been obsessed with Outlander and other shows and books that were about, times in the past where people were able to heal themselves using plants. When I got this book, I don't know the timing was right, something, I started looking through it and I found a couple recipes that I felt were intriguing. So I ordered some of those herbs or I had some of them. it just sparked something in me, and I spent months in all of my free time. My family was annoyed in all of my free time. I would just be reading and reading and reading, learning what each herb does. Yes. Learning recipes, how to use them together, yes. But also imagining myself in like a stone apothecary, wearing long skirts and whatever, knowing exactly. How to use every single one, as if it was a magical power. And I was imagining myself with the very, you know, tactile mortar and pestle and little jars and wooden drawers. this was myself playing in my head. this is what I do. I research things, but I imagine myself, while I'm researching them, I'm picturing a different existence. I think this is a mental way of pretend play. Of course I paint. I also still pretend in my mind when I'm doing other things. All the time. All the time I play piano, not very well, but I used to play piano better and I'm trying to relearn it again. so there are a couple of pieces that I'm trying to learn and a couple of pieces that I still know by heart. And when I sit at the piano, more often than not, I do imagine that somebody is there having challenged me or like asked me. Oh, you think you play piano? Show me something. I'll be like, okay. And I sit down to play as if I'm performing in front of somebody and then I get really upset when I make mistakes. And I imagine what I would have to say,'cause I can't play any of it perfectly, I imagine that all the time when I'm singing lullabies to my kids, I sing a lot of songs to the kids at bedtime at night, sometimes in the dark. When I'm laying there next to them, I do close my eyes and imagine that I'm up on a stage somewhere people are listening and paying attention to me. what would that be like, sometimes I can't believe I share all these things with you on this podcast. I still on a regular basis, not a regular basis, occasionally try to test to see if I can move things with my eyes. Did you ever do the thing where you like set a paperclip down in front of you on the table and you stare at it and see if you can get it to move just a little bit with your eyes to see if you have telekinesis? I hope you said yes and not no, and stopped listening to this podcast. I still do things with my kids. I do play some, we have a joke in the car that I have green light power. My husband has red light power. If he's in the car, we hit every single red light. Always, if he's not in the car somehow, I think it's just'cause I drive too fast. But we hit all the green lights and so we always joke that his power is stronger than mine. And then I pretend to shoot my power at the red light when I know it's about to turn green. And the kids are always thrilled that I can turn it green. I had a therapist say this to me one time that sort of changed my whole outlook. As adults, sex is something that we do to have fun together, right? I know there's a lot of stigma around it. I know a lot of people struggle with this or have had unfortunate situations in their past that have changed their reaction to it, but when it comes right down to it, it's something adults can do for fun together. You can play and pretend and lose yourself in the moment. I think play can lift us out of ruts. It can soften our fears and help us imagine new possibilities for every angle of our life. And I think imagination is the first step that we can take toward any transformation that we want in our life. First, we have to be able to imagine ourselves in a different scenario, whether that's looking differently, feeling differently, doing something different. In a different house, in a different city with a different partner, whatever. You have to imagine it first before you can pursue it. Any transformation starts with imagination. Just think about that. We're so close. We're still imagining. We're just not taking it to play. Let's talk about how play could change hard situations because this is what I think happens when you play, when you get good at it, when it starts to come naturally again, it changes the way that you approach hard situations. A stressful situation becomes less suffocating when you approach it with curiosity instead of pressure. You don't have to imagine that it's life or death. There are people who have jobs that are life or death, so for those neurosurgeons out there, or the people that are running mission control at nasa? Yes, your job is very stressful. Air traffic controllers, your job is very stressful. It is life or death, and I am sorry for that. I'm sure that there are ways that play can enter the picture, and I hope that you're playing in your free time to let yourself down from that pressure. But for the vast majority of us, these are not life or death situations. So if you can approach something with curiosity instead of pressure, it absolutely changes the way that your body thinks about the possible scenarios and possible solutions to a problem. You're not also injecting adrenaline into the situation, which does not help. That does not make your brain think more creatively. conflict gets easier when you see it as a puzzle. Instead of a threat, if you're just trying to think about what could happen next in this scenario, if the conflict was you're holding two Barbie dolls and they're having conflict and you're sort of removed from it, and you can think about it that way, you might come up with much different solutions then if you are emotionally involved and feeling like the conflict is threatening your safety somehow. That's a different kind of thought process for you, a lot of people feel like that in relatively benign conflict situations can feel very threatening, but if we can find a way to approach those situations from a little bit more playful puzzle solving mindset. that would change things a lot. big decisions become lighter. You can imagine multiple possibilities. You can imagine where they might each play out. The big decisions don't feel so big, burnout loosens absolutely. When you give yourself permission to be silly, when you start to play and imagine games and scenarios. You're not as burned out because you're lighting up something inside of you that never gets attention. When you're doing whatever the thing is that's burning you out, parenting becomes connection as opposed to survival. You don't have to just survive every day. You can connect with your kids. Look what my kids said to me. I like it because you play with me. That's connection. He feels seen and he feels like he has somebody who loves him enough to sit and be present and listen to his silly rules that he wants to make up for whatever game we're playing and acknowledge them and listen and hand over some of that power and turn off some of that stress. It changes your energy. Even as a brain surgeon or an air traffic controller or an astronaut, some of the most innovative solutions that have come out in the last forever ever come from creativity. I promise you, being stressed. It does not help any situation. It's not controllable. I'm not suggesting that you are less than because you allow yourself to be stressed. It's involuntary, right? But if you can also be curious and creative, that solves a lot. That opens up a whole world of possibility for you. Play doesn't remove the hard things from your life. I think it just changes your posture towards them. And that changes everything. The way that you approach it changes everything. Should we talk for a minute about playing with our kids? I actually know a lot of adults who claim to have no imagination and say that playing with their kids is really difficult for them because they don't understand how to come up with creative games or how to play, for some of them they don't even remember as a child being terribly imaginative. I don't know what it's like to be them. Obviously, I'm not in everybody's head. I do know that we all have an imagination. I think everybody has the ability to think of new ideas and create scenarios in our heads. We do it in our own lives. We think up worst case scenarios readily. We can think about what might happen if X, Y, Z dominoes fall, right? we just need to think about play in a different way, and for those of you that feel like playing is impossible or feels painful, there's a couple of things I wanna ask you. One. is it the play that is painful or is it the idea of sitting down and allowing yourself to just be present and turning off your vigilance for a time that's painful. I have a hypothesis that that's it. It's not the play, it's not the actual activity that you're being asked to participate in. I think that it is the idea of turning off the part of yourself that has become central to your identity and the thing that keeps the engine running If you're a parent who takes on the majority of the parenting responsibilities and you're trying to keep track of field trip, permission slips and sports practices and jerseys, God the jerseys, keeping them clean and making sure you know where they are, school supplies and teacher conferences along with anything that's not related to the kids. Are there holidays coming? Are there gifts that need to be bought? Birthday parties, the list is endless. So if you're a person who has taken on most or all of those responsibilities, and then somebody is asking you to set that aside for a time and just sit and be present, that does feel threatening. I can see where that can feel painful. Because it's already so difficult for you to be keeping it all straight. It almost feels like somebody's asking you to pick up yet another responsibility of play. If that's the case, I think there's some, deep digging that's needed to figure out how to reframe play for yourself. Because I know it's important, not just in a, mental space kind of a way. It is physiologically important for you to be able to step out of the fight or flight mode that your nervous system is in when you are trying to keep track of all the things all the time. It is physically important for you to do that and play is the best way. It might not be the sitting down and playing PAW Patrol with your kids. That may not be the way you would choose but something physical that happens within you when you sit and play with your kids and you feel that connection that starts to form between the two of you. When you start to feel your kids' energy too, and you see the look that they give you, or the smiles or the hugs. That also feeds you in ways that you are not getting anywhere else. You can't get that anywhere else. it's so important. even if it's not you coming up with creative games, even if it's just you sitting down and playing war with a deck of cards, Or playing Monopoly or letting them make up the game and just going along with it. it's so important and it absolutely is a muscle that will get stronger over time I have always had the spark of creativity as I just showed you, as I just told you all about in detail, but I do think that I lost it for a little while, or at least I lost awareness of it. I talked about that moment when I had my first baby and it was a couple of weeks in and it just crashed down over me that I was gonna need to be responsible for every hour as we were going through the day and keeping track of when it was time to feed the baby and whether or not their diaper had been changed and whether or not they had napped enough. that realization, was so painful because it took away a vital part of my ability to play because a huge part of playing is losing track of time and setting down your responsibilities, and as the mother or parent of a newborn baby, that's a really tough time to play. You can't really release your awareness of everything that's around you for a time. I think that's one of the things that makes it so difficult, for a few years after that, I was so caught up in mothering and making sure that I was doing everything correct. I was also in a phase of my career where I was aggressively trying to grow and get promoted and learn new things. I was trying to be perfect in every element of my life, I just had stopped playing and the burnout came quickly it lasted a long time. But that sense of play has started returning over the last few years and it's really returned now. And it feels amazing. It's so joyful, and I don't feel like I am setting down my responsibilities, like I'm not losing track of things. If anything, I feel like in the same way that sleep does play, resets something in my brain that makes it easier for me to hold all of the different things that are on my plate. It almost makes my plate a little bit bigger a little bit stretchier. There's something that happens inside of my brain after I have been playing that feels so good. It's smooths over all of the rough edges and just makes me more willing to take on whatever it is that's in front of me, even if it puts me right back into task mode. And you know, the kids love it. When I think back to my childhood and I think about some of my favorite moments with my parents, When they were playing with us, my mom is a uniquely creative person. She was an elementary school teacher. She was one of those teachers that the kids really looked forward to coming to school to see her. She retired almost, oh yeah. 20 years ago. And I still run into people on a fairly regular basis. When they find out my maiden name, they're like, wait, was your mom a teacher at this elementary school? I think I had her for third grade. And they're always smiling. They always love to talk about her because she turned everything into a game. I remember even as a kid. I have vivid memories of the first time that she taught us how to roll coins. Like we had piggy banks full of whatever coins and we were gonna take them to the bank. We found out that we had bank accounts we didn't know about, so you would roll up a thing of pennies. And you would close it up, and then you had to write your bank account on the outside of the paper roll. so she challenged us to memorize our bank account numbers. And our bank account numbers were like 12 or more digits long, and we were kids, So that's a lot of numbers to try to memorize. And so she turned them into a song for us. she made it very rhythmic and she turned it into a song. And as we were rolling these coins, we were singing our bank account number and. I remember that number. To this day, it hasn't been my bank account for decades. I still can recite that song and that number. She used to bring her guitar out all the time and she would sing all kinds of songs with us and she taught me how to. play school. I always wanted to be just like her, and we had a little chalkboard in the basement and we had a little table that I would set my dolls around and play school. she leads with imagination in almost every area of her life. those are some of my favorite memories. My dad sees magic everywhere he goes, whether it's a snowy day, and he would take us outside and he would help us build a snowman and we would make up stories about the snowman, what he was doing or how he was feeling. We used to drive down to Florida a lot when I was a kid. We had a relative that lived out in Florida, which is a very long drive, and so halfway through we would stop and we would stay at a Howard Johnson somewhere. That he would have called ahead and made a reservation and we would swim in the kind of gross hotel pool. And he made it so magical. I thought that this was the best hotel. I had no idea I'd never stayed in other hotels. I thought it was the greatest thing. I just remember life feeling light and fun all the time. And those are some of my favorite moments with my parents, and they're all. Play based. Okay. Let's talk about how you are going to start incorporating play back into your life. one of the easiest ways to do this is using props tools, things that adults can use as toys when you're trying to start playing again. easy things might be coloring books or let's say you love gardening, you can start in your garden imagining little stories about your plants or hiding things in the plants and letting people find them. I don't know. pretend games come easily to me. I know they don't come easily to everybody. If they do come easily to you, but you just haven't been doing it, please, please start doing it. If they don't come easily to you. I would challenge you to come up with one pretend game. Choose a prop. Okay, so when I was little, not that little. When I was a teenager, I used to babysit a lot and one of my favorite props to bring with me or create while I was there with the kids was a set of buttons. I used to have a template for a keyboard, like a computer keyboard. Or a template for a number pad, and I would print that out and then cut up the buttons either into groups or individual buttons. And then we would scotch tape them all over the house. I'm sure the parents loved this. Not on the walls, On the underside of something, or hidden in places under the windowsill or on the side of the door, and only we knew where they were. And then you can make up endless games to go with buttons. Maybe you are manning a spaceship, maybe you are the ruler of some kind of a, big castle that has hidden compartments, and you're gonna use those buttons to open the doors to the hidden compartments. It could be anything, literally anything. But we would run around and remember where these buttons were, and type in the codes whatever it was. whatever. It was so much fun. Maybe you're in ancient times and you find these hidden hieroglyphics and you have to try to translate them. pick a prop, something that you could imagine being something else and just run with it. just sit down and write a story about it. No one has to read it. You can burn it when you're done with it if you want to, don't edit as you go. Just let it flow out of you. And make up a story. If you have kids, just observe them. I promise they're playing, pretend, and imagination all the time. Jump in. Or even if you all like a TV show or a movie and you watch it together, maybe pretend to be that for a time. I don't know if any of you watch Bluey One of my favorite shows in the world. all they do is pretend games. Steal one of those from that show. Try it out. If you don't have kids, do it with your partner. Do it alone. Find a friend to come and play with you. Everybody needs this. play is not just frivolity, All adults are simply children in grownup bodies with more responsibility, not less imagination, maybe more imagination. We have more to pull from. We know more about the world. I don't think we stop playing because we grow up. I think we stop playing because we forget how, and it stops being necessary, I'm pushing against that now. I think it's pretty necessary. I want you to start incorporating play. I want you to feel that you are longing for something more joyful. I want you to acknowledge and be easy with yourself. If there is discomfort on when you remember what you used to love to do or what you are feeling like you want to do, I want you to just experiment in tiny ways, tiny ways, cooking, dinner. Pretend that you're like. a witch with a witch's brew that you're creating or casting a spell. Eventually you'll be much more confident in yourself, and that comes from embracing these other parts of yourself that have fallen dormant. Tell me this, where is play calling you back? Listen to yourself. Look for opportunities. Which part of you is tired of being serious all the time? What tiny moment could you reclaim this week? No matter how tiny while you're in the shower? Draw shapes in the steam on the wall. It could be a tiny, tiny act of play. What would your inner child say? If they could speak right now, would they be happy? Would they be sad? Would they be angry? Would they have all kinds of ideas for ways that they wish you were spending your time? Maybe they're satisfied. Do you think they're satisfied? What would it feel like to let yourself imagine? Again, play is not frivolous. It's how we return to ourselves and to color. It's one of the greatest gifts we can offer ourselves and the people that we love. If something in this episode sparked a memory or reminded you of part of yourself you'd like to reclaim claim, send me an email. I would love to hear your story. I wanna hear about the games that you're playing or that you used to play as a kid and you're not sure how to incorporate them now. The things that you can imagine doing, please email me, Laura, at a life in color.co. And if you try one of these tiny play experiments that we just talked about, please tell me how it went. I promise I won't judge you. I won't even share it if you don't want me to. I do wanna see your Lego castles, and if you wanna record yourself with a silly accent, I wanna hear that too. This is something I'm really passionate about and I hope we keep talking about this. I will share my future games that I come up with. follow us on Instagram. It's underscore a life and color underscore, and I'll share some of the games that we're playing over here and I hope that you will share yours as well. I hope that you all have the best week. We're in the holidays now. I hope that you are surrounded by colorful lights and beautiful music and joy everywhere you look and I will talk to you next week. If today's episode stirred something in you, you can continue the journey at a life in color.co. That's where you'll find our journals, our rituals, soon to be color maps and fine art prints of the elemental primas in various sizes. All creations designed to bring more color and courage into your everyday life. Thank you for supporting this work and for supporting yourself. Bye now.