The Year of Play, Pt. One

2024 is meant to be The Year of Play. For me, it all started out well enough. We welcomed the new year in Kauai, I was weeks away from finalizing a life-altering business deal I'd been putting together for six months.

It was all roses until it wasn't.

I'm not here to focus on what fell apart. By February, I was picking up the pieces of my life. As maybe the least of my worries, play wasn't coming naturally. It was still helpful - at times, I found play to be a necessary escape. A way of staying distracted by the present, if you will.

When I go on these year-long pursuits, I usually have a thesis in mind. For Play, I wanted to be open. When my dog or my boy engaged me with play, I wanted to check my excuses and delays, and challenge myself to find what could be more worth a moment of play. (In the months leading up to 2024, I'd started to recognize the explicit invitations I was experiencing - my boy will literally come up to me and say 'Do you want to play with me?')

I've done enough of these The Year of [x] journeys to know what's in store for me is never limited to what I originally had in mind. I thought entering the year that I'd be changed by time spent without purpose (credit Kai Conragan for this beauty of a definition for play). I'd say yes to play more often, probably lighten up quite a bit, and be transformed in some beautiful and challenging ways. Life shouldn't be so serious, after all. Maybe engaging in play more often would make all this a little more enjoyable. I was excited about who I'd become if I was able to do it.

But play wasn't doing that for me. If anything, the absence of desire to play was further weighing on me (in addition to all the other shit of Q1). It's almost like when I was working on a screenplay about heroin (I leaned into my artsy era in my 20s) - I hadn't done the drug, so I was going around interviewing folks who had to learn about it. One thing that stuck with me was the cycle of addiction. At some point, whether they tried it as a celebration or an escape, they'd return to it out of necessity. Life gets hard, and euphoria was only a hit away.

(On euphoria, I find myself endlessly fascinated with the draw or appeal of such a destructive drug as heroin. When I think of it, I think of the yellowing skin, the crippling addiction, the lives it has torn apart. I was really curious what, exactly, drew anyone to it. My friend described it to me: it's like that moment when you like someone, and you find out they like you in return.

So that's it. Maybe the most addictive drug we have is falling in love.)

The problem was it didn't make all the hard shit go away. So coming out of the high, you've lost the chemical rush and are missing it. In addition, you're facing the same pile of unresolved shit that didn't change just because you went on a bender. The users I spoke to described this as a hole that kept getting deeper, only serving to compound the allure of the next high.

For me, play wasn't at all like heroin, but I felt that compounding effect of not even wanting to play. In addition to not having the levity of play to bring moments of joy, I was staring daily at the abyss of what I was trying to piece together. The whole time I could feel myself getting further from who I'd set out to become this year through this journey discovering Play in my life.

In hindsight, I don't know much of what I'd do different. Sometimes, as my good friend Aaron Sullivan says, the only way out is through. I couldn't force myself to feel like playing. Maybe it was just a season of working through shit. The good news is as I'm working on my shit, I'm discovering other aspects of play.

Something I've been really enjoying lately is watching my kids play. Particularly when I'm at a social gathering. Lately I've experienced regular anxiety when in crowds. This year, when I've found myself in these settings - a kid's birthday, a dinner party, etc - and in need of a bit of a break, I can escape in an entirely socially acceptable way by turning my attention to the kids. Stepping aside to give a bit of adult supervision is not strange at all. It draws far less attention (speaking from experience) than trying to find a secluded spot to soothe an oncoming anxiety attack.

And I love it. I'm utterly fascinated by kids, particularly groups of kids. Their conversations are about nothing but seem to mean so much. I LOVE listening in on kids conversations. They don't know shit but they're convinced they do.

As I've watched, the major thing that stands out is their natural proclivity towards play. And something I've been observing is how they organize play.

At the drop of a hat, one of the kids will suggest a game. When it makes sense to me is when it resembles a game I understand. There's a soccer ball, there are goals, they split into two competing groups and play - I get it. But my boy was telling me the other day about a game he was playing in a bounce castle, and I was having an incredibly difficult time tracking so much of it.

So you know how a bounce castle sometimes can be made of different colored panels? Almost like a quilt? Well, this bounce castle had this type of colored pattern. Apparently the game was to bounce around, and if you touched one of the colors, you became that color or belonged to it, and your job then became to drag / push / grab / force someone else to touch your color and they'd join you in converting more kids to the cause.

I had so many questions. Which colors, how did this not lead to fights or kids getting hurt? (Other parents have confirmed, the kids seemingly played in the bounce castle for hours and no one seemed to get hurt or upset.) The major question I had was who came up with the game. Turns out my boy did. Okay, how did you come up with this? Shrug, I just did.

Okay, how did you get the other kids to play? Another shrug - I just told them we could play a fun game and they said yes.

(A side note on my boy. At this same party, they had one of those dunk tanks. You know, the one where you throw baseballs at a target and if you hit it, the seat drops out from whoever is above the tank and they fall into a pool of water? So my boy was telling me how right when this guy - it was kind of a company party / community summer party, so I presume it was someone who worked at or with the company - was about to climb up on the seat, like right when he got up on the seat, my boy had snuck over and hit the target with his elbow. So the guy goes flailing back in; apparently he let out a little surprised yell.

So I'm shocked listening to him tell me about it. Did he get upset, the guy who fell in? Nope, he just said we're supposed to throw the ball at the target. Okay, so did you go back and try to throw at the target? Here's when my boy gets this sly grin on his face, so I understand there's more to the story. Nope, I pretended to throw the ball, but instead ran over and hit the target with the ball in my hand. And you didn't get in trouble for this? Like he didn't get mad? Laughing, shaking his head - nope. He just laughed.

So my kid's out here pranking grown-ass men, and getting away with it. I don't know whether to try and correct his behavior or tip my cap in admiration.)

Another thing about the structuring of play - I've started to notice how naturally play evolves for kids once they're in it. A game of soccer evolves when one of the girls decides she's a scorpion and her job is to lie in the middle of the field and the players should try to avoid getting 'stung' by her leg stabbing out at them as they run by. This bounce castle colored panel game seemed to turn into a version of capture the flag, where they were trying to get from one side to the next without getting caught, then morphed into kind of stuck in the mud, but whoever got tagged became an egg until someone came along and freed them.

When my boy tells me about all this, it makes perfect sense to him. But I probably spent an hour trying to understand what the hell happened and how nobody got hurt (and how my son keeps getting away with being anointed the ring leader).

As I've been observing, it's natural to compare the dynamics of power of kids vs adults. Who's in charge, who sets the rules, who enforces the rules if someone tries and fails to evolve the rules, etc. How does all this happen? After all, we're not terribly different animals than the children we once were. Certain situations have an inherited structure - work, for example, has levels of authority and established goals to operate within. So when someone suggests something and is trying to gather others around it, they use these structures. The more they can leverage these mechanisms, the more power they wield.

Maybe the more straightforward analogy is to stick closer to play. For adults, consider a party. What topics are discussed, what music is played, what games are played. At some point in time, someone suggests something and others either go along with it or they don't. Children, as far as I can tell, use a relatively simple filter: is this fun? Adults have way more layers to sort through - ego, reputation, self perception, history. We need to sort through all of this before we'll go along.

No wonder play isn't as natural as we get older.

We're almost halfway through the year. I'm latching onto this awareness - I have built up a million reasons why not to play at any given moment. But I want to (maybe need to is the more appropriate descriptor) play more. I've processed a bunch of my shit and am better off for it. I'm carrying some weariness and definitely some scar tissue, but I've got deeper awareness and another set of tools to relate to myself and others. Maybe more importantly, I'm settling into a sense of ease.

I'm more comfortable in my skin than ever. I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm going to be okay; I've proven to myself I can take the blows and come out ahead. I can feel the ground steadying below my feet. The comfort I've found in this has already started to lead to play. Not only feeling more inspired to play, feeling deep gratitude to be in moments where I want to play has unlocked something I can't name yet.

As I transition into the latter half of 2024, I'm looking for more. More dancing. More singing. More smiling. More of the present. More laughter and children and sunshine and enjoyment. More time spent without purpose. Late night conversations with friends over tea. Joints around a firepit. Time spent contemplating art. Writing. Taking in the sunset. Observing the bees. Wrestling with my puppy. Traveling. Choosing fun.

This is how I'm planning to go about it: I'm starting with my body. I want to feel where the playful and silly live in my body. I want to allow it to come out. Embody play, and see what happens.

Why the body? I'm just starting to be aware of the wisdom in my body. I understand someday (God willing), I'll see each of my kids off to University. It'll mark the end of one of the most amazing period of my life, where I got to be with these incredible people as they learned about the world, and held their tiny bodies as they grew into kids, teenagers, and by the time they leave, some level of adults. If I imagine that moment, what it'll be like to hug my daughter one last time before she heads off, I can sense two ways it'll go. One is I'll realize in the moment all I'm losing, and maybe grip a little tighter, all off a sudden wishing I could hold onto this feeling forever. The second is just as meaningful, perhaps a tiny bit less drama. They'll be back, and more grown, or with a family, and we'll just get to keep experiencing the privilege of her (and then him).

I can feel each of these hugs distinctly in my body, right now. My body knows where each of these comes from, and where the aches or peace reside. I don't understand it, but I'm learning to trust it. So I want to explore it. I want to find where it's holding the good, and set it free.

As we've rounded the halfway point of 2024, I'm stoked with where I'm at. If I could predict what is to come, I'm currently learning a lot about grief, and letting go of expectations. What these have to do with play I could make some educated guesses, but I've gone on enough of these pursuits to know what's in store for me is generally never what I originally had in mind, so I'll save my energy for now.

I'll check in later as I have more to share.

Letting go of expectations

Enabler? Kind of necessary or at very least helpful

Evelyn's intensity in play at 91