No more playing hard. Just play. And be seen playing.

How many roles do we play in a given day? How many different sets of responsibilities do we manage from one hour to the next? 

How many times do we need to switch from one to the next, often in a split second, and how do we switch that quickly, how do we quickly assess the demands and arrive in a place where we are able to make the right choices? 

How aware are we of the switch? And finally, how do we, can we align all of the roles and responsibilities and fully formed identities within us? Can we get them on the same channel, is it even possible to bring our full complete selves to a moment in our day?

Just writing this out, considering the variables, alignment feels like an impossibility.

But what happens when we play? Really play? Is it that all of those channels are aligned? Or that we forget to check in with them? Do we leave all of those needs and responsibilities behind and spend time playing beside them, outside of them?

Why is play so much fun and why don't we do it more often?

And why is work hard play hard a thing? Who wants to play hard?

Why is this action so hard to come by? Maybe because it is a pure movement of freedom? We have stepped outside of awareness of ourselves and our world and tapped into a state of mind free from boundaries. We are sublimated within some indeterminate space, and we play. We are detached from the thinking mind and the feeling body and dispersed into the world around us.

Is this not a form of meditation, well-being, mindfulness? Maybe the first form of these now complicated practices? The first way we figured out how to access this altered, heightened state of mind? And then we took this simple act of play and complicated it by thinking about it too much, trying to optimize it, perfect it, instead of just enjoying the mystery of it without asking why or how.

If there's one verb, one form of movement we don’t question, let it be play. Let's just play. And be seen playing, and show our kids how to play. How great would it feel to step outside of ourselves more often?

You know that feeling you get when you've been away from loved ones for a very, very long time? The anticipation of that first moment of reconnection, then the sight of them, and then the hug? I bet coming back to ourselves after a long bout of play is a lot like that.