S5 Ep 87: The Serious Act of Play - Why it really matters (even for Grown Ups)
This week, we're diving into the seriousness of play. Play isn’t just for kids. It’s not frivolous. It’s not a waste of time. In fact — play is how we learn, experiment, expand, and move forward when life gets messy.
Tune in to get:
a reminder of why play is so important
how play changed my life
a creative framework for how we can get into a space of play
Episode Transcript
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Almost Grown…Up, the podcast where we figure out life. One creative detour at a time.
Hi, I'm Lucie, a writer, creator, and your creative companion, and around here we believe that play and wonder aren't just for kids. In fact, they're the tools that we use to navigate life's big questions, reconnect with joy, and find our way when we realize the map is not our map. Each week we'll explore growing up with stories, creative prompts, and one big permission slip to create our own beautifully and occasionally messy life.
Welcome to the Blanket fort, let's Dive In. Hey team, welcome back to the blanket port. So today we are gonna dive into the topic of play and why it really matters. Think of this as kind of like one of the core parts of our toolkit. One of the things that we're gonna keep coming back to, to remember, and I think it's important as we move through, play as a tool to really just spend a moment.
Reminding ourselves that. Play is something that matters [00:01:00] and it's really easy to feel like it's frivolous, right? It has this impression of being something that belongs in childhood. We have these phrases where it's like, ah, stop playing around. Just be, can you be serious for one second? Ah, stop playing with that thing and come and focus.
You know, a lot of the time play is positioned as something that is frivolous. And add on top of life. You know, that thing that you do. When you get the time, if you are lucky, when you are feeling a bit silly or whatever, rather than I think the tool that it is, and I found that this impression is really difficult to change.
Quite often people ask me what I do and I mean, I'm really bad at answering the, so what do you do? Question. In fact, it's something I could talk about for a long time, but I won't right here and now. But often what happens is I start to answer that question with, oh well, um, I talk a lot about play and I kind of create content around people, how people can add more play and wonder into [00:02:00] their lives and how we think about growing up and how we define that for ourselves.
And I sort of start to see people's eyes glaze over because they're kind of like. What is she talking about? Play? What does she mean? Like playing with toys? Like I don't get it. I, it doesn't, it doesn't resonate because all of the associations that we have with that word I. Can sometimes make it quite hard to really understand the power that play has and what it's doing for us, because it can seem as frivolous as an add-on top, as a nice to have, rather than as an essential tool.
The thing that we can use to. Give ourselves permission to not be perfect, to give ourselves permission to grow, to give ourselves a root, a method to move from following somebody else's path, to carving and crafting our own. So play became a serious thing for me.
Because [00:03:00] it saved my life. And I want to pause for a moment and tell you when I became obsessed with play and why., because it's been a growing love affair. But there are a few moments in life which I feel like a pivotal, you know, when you have those days where you're gonna remember them forever because something changed, something clicked, and.
If you've listened to the podcast before, you'll be probably familiar with the story of how I came to start the podcast and why I wanted to redefine growing up. Basically, I was turning 30 and I realized that I had built this life that looked really good on the outside, that I thought had all of the things that I was supposed to have by this adult age that made me a grownup that should make me successful and therefore make me happy.
And what I felt was. Not happy at all. I felt trapped. I felt like I had messed it all up. Somehow I'd built this thing and it wasn't [00:04:00] enough, or I didn't feel good, and who was I to feel like that and how was I ever going to rectify that? Because I felt at that moment, like I had two choices either to live in a life that didn't fit me, that wasn't right, but looked good.
And feel the suffering of a daily understanding of not really being able to be myself or to choose a different definition of growing up, to be, I guess, step outside of what I thought it had been and be willing to say goodbye to all of that old definition of growing up, but then step into this scary space of nothing of.
I mean, for all intents and purpose, like one huge failure, right? You spent all of your twenties building something that then just before your 30th birthday, you grenade, you know, like full on, blow all of that stuff up. And it was really hard. I remember [00:05:00] having moments where I felt like I've like, I'm screwed up now.
That's it. Like life failed. Like it was a test that I had not passed, and it was the test of life like. Oh, how heavy to feel like you failed at life and not really know where to go. I genuinely believed that that was it. Now I was just going to be unhappy because either reality wasn't a great one, and I had this day where I was in a very dark hole.
I was in a deep place, and thankfully I had a wonderful friend who. I just sat with me and held the space, and I remember sitting on her sofa just crying and feeling so helpless and overwhelmed and lost, but like so, so lost. So to the point [00:06:00] where it was like, what is there of life left for me? Like genuinely where, where do you go from here if you failed at life like.
What do you do? And she just let me talk and she just let me be there. And eventually she suggested that we leave the house for some fresh perspective and some fresh air. And I remember it was a walk of feeling lost and down, but also the movement made me feel like, okay. At least I'm okay now. In this moment.
I'm okay now and with this person, I, I can be okay in this moment. And I think that's really important to be able to step into the present and be able to say, okay, in this moment, I'm okay. but what popped up in that moment with my open eyes was a pink ball from a ball pond. You know, those like very [00:07:00] light balls. And in noticing that, I just started kicking it down the street and my friend kicked back and I kicked back and we had this game of football with this pink ball that got more and more silly and engaged. And the more and more I stepped into that, I stepped into the present moment and I felt joy and I laughed and I felt silly.
And the rest of that walk became about silliness and joy and. We stopped talking about life as failure and started living it in the present moment and the gateway, the door that I stepped through to get there, to get from, pretty much I would describe it as like a deep despair of life into joy and presence and a glimmer of possibility.
Was [00:08:00] by being playful, was by playing my way into a different state of being. And I didn't decide to do. It wasn't a choice. It wasn't something that I was like, oh, I know Will will help play. And it's useful. Now. I know it will help because it means that when I have those moments, when I have hopefully not many moments of deep, deep despair, but when I have those moments that are harder or that feel frustrating, or where I feel lost.
I know that play is this tool that can help me change state, but that in that moment was this first realization that there was a part of me that was not in despair. There was a part of me that was excited about what life could bring. There was a part of me that could see possibility. There was a part of me that wanted to engage, enjoy in that moment, and.
I'm lucky that I was there with such a wonderful friend that would play in that space with me that would say yes to it and jump in, because I think that changed everything. And I [00:09:00] guess what I want to do here is make sure that you have somewhere to go when you need to play, and some space that you can say yes, and we will play now.
And I'm here to be your play companion, to be that creative person, to champion your journey of playing because I fundamentally believe that that moment of play. Changed my life and, and ultimately saved my life in a sense of me being able to make a decision that was right for me, that made me able to live my life rather than a predefined one that I thought was expected of me or a life of despair in this, this gap.
And. As I spoke about in the last episode, I really in that moment started to move forward in redefining what growing up went for me. And it had this deep work of accepting and taking responsibility for the fact that I'd built a life at that point for the, for my hand in all of the choices that I'd made.
Even if they weren't the [00:10:00] choices that felt right to me. I'd still built that life, I'd still put myself in that position, and. It was up to me to accept that that's where I was and to take responsibility for the changes I wanted to make. But when I stepped into that place of wonder and play, it moved away from being the heavy work of incept acceptance, the what can sometimes feel like difficult struggle to accept and, and be responsible, and to figure out what that responsibility means and instead move into this place of possibility where.
I'd done a bit of that work and now I could spend the time peeking through the window of what could be opening that door to a new world and exploring what was there, what was on the other side. Right? Because once we move through that acceptance and responsibility, we can get to the other side, and the other side is where play and wonder flourish.
The other side is where we can. Expand and bloom and grow. And so [00:11:00] for me, play is the foundation of how we do that. Play really matters because it is, it's how we make meaning. And there was this lovely quote that I'm gonna read because I don't wanna mess it up, , from Susan Lin, who is an American psychiatrist, and she writes, play is the foundation of learning, creativity, self-expression, and constructive problem solving.
It is how children wrestle with life and make it meaningful. And what I wanna do in this moment is take children out of that sentence and put in people, it is how people wrestle with life and make it meaningful.
Exactly right. Like that. That's it. Okay. That, that. Is what we are doing. We are making meaning. It's not something we have to go out and find. In fact, we get to play our way to what feels meaningful to us, to wrestle with what it is to be [00:12:00] alive and to hopefully through the tool of wonder, find joy and beauty and connection and through play, find growth and possibility and different ways of being that.
Connect us that help us change what is perhaps broken that help us feel like an active participant in, in the thing of living to really experience life, both in the moment and in the doing
so. The Pink Bull story has another side.
It has months afterwards of a lot of work and maybe even years of ushering myself out of that deep well of despair and opening the door to find out. There was multiple possibilities there for me, and I'll expand more on this in, in a different podcast, but I remember that he was. By picking up those [00:13:00] tools of, of playing that I really started to try things started to dip my toe in what could be.
And on the days that were really hard, it was actually wonder that helped me the most. I remember having a conversation with my mom where. I just said, I just dunno how to be with this sense of grief for the life that I was saying goodbye to with the person that I was saying goodbye to. It felt really heavy.
I felt like I'd lost a limb. Snd I remember her saying, I think Lucie just. She's such a wise woman. yay, mom. A and thank you for watching or listening because I know you are 'cause you're the best. Love you., I think, Lucie, you just be in the present moment, in the small thing you're in and enjoy the cup of tea you are having.
And make [00:14:00] it as small and as simple as that. Just try and find moments of joy in the every day. And I think that's what wonder is for us. It's not that big. Hey, let's go out and find a mountain and feel awe as we watch the sunrise over like Everest. Obviously that would feel awesome and like so full of awe, but.
It can feel awesome to sit and see the beauty of that lovely cup of tea that you made and maybe the sunlight dancing through the window, or the fact that one tiny flower has grown its way through the cracks in a pavement or that a friend left you a voice note or. That the cloud made the shape of a turtle and just wonder at that everyday beauty that exists that is there, that reminds us that whatever else is going on.
And it's not to say that life is not hard, that there are not hard things to deal with, that there are not horrors in the [00:15:00] world, that there are not difficult things because I think we are all far too aware that that is the very, very harsh reality. And for a lot of people, that is a very. Big daily reality.
But one thing we do all have the option to access is a moment to wander up the goodness that is there and to go and look for it. and that combined with play, that noticing, that curiosity, that ability to wonder in the small good things and then move into playful action of possibility, I think are the ticket.
I think the, the start of building our own map, of stretching out that piece of paper and saying, Hey, scrapping this map. This is not my map. I am going to go and go on this path. So how do we play, how do we step into that space?, well I've put [00:16:00] it into a mini framework, which I hope will be memorable, because it's spelled out play.
So I think we need to give ourselves permission. I. I think the very first thing to step into play is giving yourself permission to play. and we'll dive into a little bit of that in detail today. I think we need to allow ourselves to look and listen, to go slow, to pay attention, to wonder, to get curious, because quite often play comes out of that asking what if.
Then we need to act. Play is not passive. Play is active. Play is taking part, play is stepping in. Play is engaging, experimenting, being willing to act in a way and see what happens, and see what reaction you get to that. And then acting again. And I think a lot of the time, small repeated actions can make a big difference.
Small repeated moments of [00:17:00] play can make life feel playful, can help us to connect with who we are and what we want to do and what the right next step is. And then the final part is saying yes to life, saying yes and to what we are doing. And. If you're familiar with improv theater, which I happen to be a huge fan of, and has been one of the ways that I've loved to play in my life more recently, yes, and is a really popular concept of we say, yes, we accept what is there, we accept what is given to us, and then we add on top, we say yes to play, and then we.
Go onto the next thing of playing. We go into the next movement. We say yes to the bids of the people around us that are suggesting something to play or that are opening up a conversation or connecting with us in some way. We say yes to, okay, this is daily life and I'm gonna go and find someone and, and I'm gonna go and find a moment to play.
Uh, and I think those are really powerful ways to step into play. And across this [00:18:00] season, we're gonna dive into those different parts in more detail and look at how we can really bring them to life and what that means. but today I just wanna spend a moment to talk about permission because the first episode was all about one big permission slip to live our lives and to be us, and to create that and to define what growing up meant for us, and to find who we were not in the box, just permission to be ourselves without any of those needed terms, those needed definitions.
But I think. We need to give ourselves permission to go on the adventure, to answer that call, to step into our own hero's journey and go on the journey, whatever that means in whatever small arc or big arc that is. Because we are always in different seasons of our lives and sometimes it is requiring big change and bravery and big steps.
And sometimes they're small things. Sometimes it's mini ways of playing mini side quests that we are gonna go on, and I think we need to give ourselves permission to. Start to use it as a tool to start [00:19:00] to explore what playing looks like to us, what that really means for us, what play really means for us, and how we can give ourselves permission to step into that way of being, to experiment a bit more, to be willing to grow and learn and make mistakes and figure it out and be a bit messy, but ultimately hold that lightly and know that it's all just experimentation.
And then. The next thing will come and we'll experiment again. So your call to adulting today is to go and find a post-it note or a piece of paper or somewhere. Maybe it's a phone, your phone screen that you're gonna write this, but you're gonna write this and put it somewhere that you can see it. And.
You are going to write your own permission slip to play, and maybe you wanna write a more extended permission slip that is giving yourself permission to create the life that you want and to adult and grow up in the way that you want, and to be yourself fully and not be in the box. Or maybe you just wanna write [00:20:00] yourself a permission slip that's like I Lucie, give myself permission to play and wonder.
Full stop. And put it somewhere you see, and use it as that reminder to be like, I, I wonder if this could be more playful. I wonder what this would look like if I said yes to playing in this moment, or to using play as a tool to figure this out. Because often I think we can surprise ourselves with what we can create in that playful space.
So today my ask of you is to go and give yourself permission. Whatever that looks like. Whatever it feels right to you, you'll know. I don't know that for you, but you know that for you. And trust that voice and give yourself permission to trust that voice, and maybe find a way to play a little bit more this week.
Thank you so much for being here with me. I'm so excited. Next episode, we're gonna dive into, uh, I think all about themes, about [00:21:00] getting lost and refining ourselves because for me. Are those seasons of being lost and, and figuring out where we are is one of the areas that play in wonder can come in.
Huge, huge help. and I really wanna explore that in more detail, but I am looking forward to being back with you in the blanket for next week. Thank you for being here. Let me know what you are doing right? Your permission slip below. Oh my God. If you wanna write yourself a permission slip in the comments, that would be amazing.
I wanna cheer you on. ,let me know what you're giving yourself. Has permission to do, and I look forward to being back in the blanket vault with you next week. But in the meantime, happy growing.