I picked it up on a whirlwind Target trip and was low key thinking and hoping it might be some fun ideas I could use with my kiddos… I ended up both disappointed and pleasantly surprised. (An experience I might add that I hadn’t had very many times in my life up until this last year, but now that mix of disappointment and ‘hey this isn’t so bad’ comes up weekly if not daily. )
Nick and I have made a lot of big moves in the last few years. We took chances, worked hard, and we are sooo much further than I think I thought we would be in some ways… August of 2018 we moved into a tent, October of 2020 we bought our first house. We have both moved our careers and job experience forward, we’ve been through a divorce, loss of a parent, and a pandemic.
We’ve grown up.
But, we haven’t traveled as much as we wanted to. We haven’t met as many people as we wanted to or tried as many new things as we wanted to. Some of that is pandemic related for sure. But the more I think about it more aware I am, that much of it, is just that those fun, playful adventures aren’t what we have prioritized at all. We’ve been so busy with work, school, buying a house, thinking about a wedding, planning a future, thinking about retirement and life insurance… we haven’t made time.
This is a trend, one that I think lots of people fall into. One that some people don’t mind being in. But one that I very much want to push back out of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of us and much of what we have been working on I want us to keep working on. But I want to start making time for playful moments again. These were thoughts I was already having… heck this was a DISCUSSION that Nick and I were having. But this book, which was nothing like I expected but also perhaps the very thing I needed to get us out of grown up mode all the time. It showed up at exactly the right time.
Nick and I work with kids. We both know how powerful and important play can be. Not only does it help you to be more creative, a better problem solver, and more relaxed… but it can help you to remember more, to be physically healthier, and to see time as moving a little bit slower. Your brains focus on new experiences. Which is why the weekends seemed like forever as a kid. New experiences are happening all the time.
But as you grow older and establish routines, your brain learns to expect certain things and stops even looking for new experiences… which of course means you could be walking right by experiences and opportunities, and your brain is in lala land. This book is like a workbook, to help wake your brain back up. It starts small… but in the end, it’s about creating room in you home and work cultures for play.
I started small with some of my valentines gifts for Nick, adding some time back into our evenings for fun stuff. The house projects we having going on this week add some more of that back in… new experiences. My attempts at new cooking ideas, do that for me a little. But as I look at the next few months, I am starting to put together a plan… a plan for play time.
Some of my ideas include:
– Working on Learning Spanish (again)… an on and off thing that I enjoy and will be turning back on, to work on those brain synapses.
– Taking a creative writing course and subsequently working on a novel idea that I came up with the other day.
– Taking a short weekend trip somewhere new next month.
– Hiding something around the house…. taking turns finding it and rehiding. When you find it, the hider owes you a treat.
Coffee & Conundrums 