When did we stop playing?
When did life get serious and all of the joy leave our day to day existence? No more unstructured fun. Play is relegated to the immature, those who don’t want to grow up.
We’re told there is a tipping point where the fun stops and the work begins. This isn’t true. We’ve been told a lie. We can believe what we choose to believe and live accordingly.
We can play through the struggles of life instead of suffering. We can play through our work instead of grinding it out.
All it takes is an internal decision to restructure your life around a different term.
When we’re told to grow up, all of the fun beings to drain out of our life. At first the leak is so small we hardly notice. But after a while the small leak turns into a downpour. Seriousness trumps every aspect of our being.
Our jobs, our work, and our being doesn’t have any lightness to it. Life becomes a struggle, a heavy blanket we can’t escape.
It doesn’t have to turn out like this, there is no point when life actually becomes something else, it’s only your decision to perceive it as such.
You can shape your viewpoint of the world.
You can choose to bring the play back.
How?
Fire your old director and bring in a new one, maybe it’s a younger you. The one who dreamed of making movies to change the world. The you who loved to roam around the woods for no reason other than the sake of exploring.
As children we don’t care about control or about success. We don’t have looming fears over our heads.
Some say it’s because we don’t know what the real world is, I say that’s bullshit.
What is defined as the adult world is simply just a large group of people buying into a collective idea of the way things should be. There isn’t a contract you signed saying you have to agree. There is nothing forcing you to have these same beliefs.
Yes, we are cultured into conformity, just as we are cultured to be consumers. But, this doesn’t meant you have to listen. What ever happened to thinking for yourself? To examining your own beliefs and deciding where to go from there?
To start playing you need to stop listening.
Stop trying to live to the expectations of others, of society, of what a well-rounded person looks like. Frankly, being well-rounded is horrifically boring. It conjures up images of a safe career, doing the same spreadsheet work day in day out, little time to do what you actually love, absolutely no boundary pushing, no chance of failure (except the continuous eating away of your soul), no evolution, no growth, only stagnation, the latest objects are the only things bringing you temporary happiness, a life not even lived.
Now that you aren’t listening where do you get your direction from?
You get it internally, from your core, your soul, your drive.
What compels you? What fills you up with life?
Do that. Become that.