What If We Never Stopped Playing?
“This is the adults' playground.”
Those were the words Julia overheard in Battersea Park while training with her husband Anadi in the outdoor gym and they inspired this podcast!
What happens when we grow up and forget how to play?
As children, play is encouraged. We explore because we're curious. We climb, run, invent, experiment, fall over and try again. We don't necessarily stop to ask whether we're good at something or what the activity will achieve for us.
Then somewhere along the way, play can become performance.
We develop ideas about who we are and what we're good at. We compare ourselves. We worry about getting things right. We become focused on achievement, productivity and external rewards.
In this episode of Pearls of Wisdom, Julia explores play as a definition she looked up!
A voluntary, intrinsically motivated activity driven by pleasure and curiosity rather than reward or utility’
Drawing on her own experience of running, training and playing in the outdoor gym, she explores the possibility that we can still strive for excellence without making our worth dependent upon the outcome.
We can train seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.
We can have goals without losing the joy of the journey.
We can be willing to be beginners, to experiment, to fail, to laugh and simply discover what happens.
Play is also a form of presence, a way of being completely here, engaged with the body and the moment, without constantly asking where it is going to lead.
Julia looks from the perspective of life itself is a playground, without everything we do needing to have a purpose!
Perhaps the child who loved to play never actually left! Maybe they've simply been waiting for us to remember!
