A Sense Of Playfulness

It’s easy to lose our sense of playfulness. In fact, at some point in our adult lives, so many of us do. We don’t realize it in the process. We really only figure it out well after the fact (if at all). 

We tend to put it down to ‘growing up’, to becoming an adult. Just a normal part of life, because life is serious business, and only kids can afford the luxury of play. 

But that’s not really the truth, at least not the way I’ve thought about it. 

I think it comes from a loss of perspective, a loss of a sense of context about what life is (and what we’re) about. 

I don’t mean this as a deficiency or a judgment of those who do. I think it is, typically, a learned response, resulting from a personally material loss or struggle in some practical sense. 

It could be struggles with our work and professional lives, when it becomes the proverbial grind, a daily process no longer within our control and with no end in sight. 

It could be issues within ourselves, health-wise, physical or mental, as we grapple with our steady lack of control and energy. 

It could be the loss of a loved one, where the pain is so unbearable that we can’t even begin to look past it. 

Each of these are real in their impact, a result of issues only we truly understand and process in our own ways. This processing is also influenced by our own conditioning, through our environment(s) growing up - friends, family, community. 

And it leads to an emphasis that is internal, a conscious or subconscious shift of attention and being away from that idea that we should play, enjoy and be happy. 

Some folks find a way to work past it, through it. I don’t want to suggest that this is down to something so simple as sheer will, though that is the case in some instances. Still, that’s too cliched, too frivolous of an answer. 

The practical math is that there is real work involved, a struggle in a different sense, to work through it, and an unwillingness to give in or give up. 

I’m not offering answers about how to get past it. I don’t pretend to have them. 

But I am fairly certain of one thing. I’m pretty sure it all starts with the recognition of what’s happened. That we have, in fact, lost our sense of playfulness. That, to me, is where the journey back begins. 

So long as we recognize that first, we can then be in a position to (begin to) do something about.