We Forgot How to Play. Here Is What It Cost Us

My best friend Jenny lived across the street when we were kids. Every summer day and most days after school she would come over and we would sit in my room, which had two windows set into little alcoves, and we would each claim one and design elaborate houses for our Barbies. I would stack cassette tape cases into staircases and pile up books to make second floors. We would fight over who got the fancy telephone. We could do this for hours, and every time someone called us to stop, I could have kept going for exactly as long as we had already been playing.

My house backed up to woods. On windy days we would run out into them and decide a storm was coming, a hurricane, something enormous and urgent, and we would spend hours gathering acorns and sticks, building pretend shelters, pretending to start fires. I do not know how long we did this on any given day. Time was not a thing that existed when we were playing. Someone would eventually call us in for dinner and we would come, reluctantly, back to the world.

I have been thinking about those afternoons a lot lately.

My seven-year-old son said something to me recently that I have not been able to stop replaying in my head. He came to find me, unprompted, and said: Mom, I really like it when you don’t work for your old company because now you play with me.

I felt proud and happy and heartbroken all at once. Proud because something had changed enough that he noticed, but heartbroken because I knew exactly what it meant about all the time before this change. He was not being accusatory, he was just telling me the truth about what he had been missing. And in doing so, he told me the truth about what I had been missing too.

We lose play so gradually that we do not notice it leaving. It becomes uncool, somewhere in the tween years, to be silly and imaginative and openly delighted. Vulnerability is part of it. When you play, you are suggesting something, offering an idea, opening yourself to the judgment of whoever is watching. Children do not yet know enough to be afraid of that. Teenagers do and by the time they have become adults, they have usually decided, somewhere along the way, that the risk is not worth it.

But I think there is something more insidious underneath the social pressure, and it is this: we start to believe that anything without a purpose is a waste. We have so many responsibilities, so many plates to keep in the air, that we cannot justify spending time on something that will not earn us money or approval or progress toward a goal. Imagination, by definition, is not efficient. It does not produce anything you can put on a spreadsheet, so we quietly let it go and call it growing up.

In Mary Poppins, the father is who we have all become. He has forgotten entirely how to imagine, how to appreciate the letter the children wrote even though it is not perfectly worded, and how to see the magic that is available to him in his own home. He is just trying to keep everything in its place. Responsible. Tidy. Correct. I watch that character now and I feel uncomfortable because I recognize him in myself.

Here is what I think we have lost track of. Play is not the opposite of work, it is the opposite of performance. When I was a child and I made my parents sit through three songs worth of dance routines I had choreographed to my Dirty Dancing soundtrack, I felt like the star of the world. I was performing, of course, but it came entirely from inside me. It was my idea of what was worth doing, my joy, my expression, with no reference to what anyone expected. Now when I perform, which is most of the time, I am working from the outside in. I understand what is expected and I produce it. The life inside me is just along for the ride.

That is the cost. Beyond the exhaustion and burnout that we all fee, when we stop playing we lose access to the part of ourselves that knows what we actually want. Play is where desire lives. It is where you find out what lights you up before the world has a chance to tell you whether it is practical. Children play their way into knowing who they are. Adults who stop playing stop updating that knowledge. They freeze at the last version of themselves that had time to imagine.

There is also something physiological happening that I do not think we talk about enough. When your nervous system is in permanent task mode and the to-do list is running on a ticker tape through your mind even as you try to sleep, play is not a luxury. It is a reset. I have noticed that after I have genuinely played, even briefly, something releases in my brain. The rough edges soften and I am more willing to take on whatever is next because something that needed attention got it. Play does for my mind what sleep does for my body. It does not remove the difficult parts of life, but it changes my posture toward them.

My mother was an elementary school teacher who turned everything into a game. She retired decades ago and I still run into her former students who light up when they hear her name. She once taught my sister and me our bank account numbers by turning them into songs. We were rolling coins on the family room floor, which seems like the most mundane possible task, and she made it into something we would remember for the rest of our lives. I can still recite that 13-digit number even though the account has been closed for decades. That is what imagination does in the hands of someone who has not let it go. It makes the ordinary worth keeping.

My father sees magic everywhere. Snowstorms became expeditions and a Howard Johnson off the highway on a long drive to Florida became the most exciting hotel I had ever seen because he made it that way. He was still playing alongside us rather than just supervising from a distance.

Those are my favorite memories of my childhood. Every single one of them is play-based.

I do not think we stop playing because we grow up. I think we stop playing because we forget how, because no one around us is doing it either, and because the world rewards seriousness to an extent that imagination feels like a risk. But your soul is not interested in being rewarded with money or bigger job titles. Your soul wants to run around in the woods pretending a hurricane is coming. Your soul wants to stack cassette tape cases into staircases and fight over the fancy telephone. Your soul has been waiting, patiently (and in some cases not so patiently) for you to come back.

I am trying to come back. When my kids ask me to play restaurant or make up a game, I am trying to say yes. When I am making dinner I am trying to remember that I am also a witch and this is a cauldron and what I add to it matters in ways that go beyond the recipe. When I catch myself in a quiet moment, I am trying to let my mind wander instead of immediately filling the space with productivity.

These are small things. They feel almost embarrassingly small when I write them down, but I think that is the nature of reclaiming play as an adult. It comes back in tiny moments before it comes back in large ones. You draw shapes in the steam on the shower wall or make up a story about something you pass on a walk. You let yourself imagine, just for a moment, before you remember that you are a serious person with a lot to do.

And then maybe, slowly, you start to forget that you are supposed to be so serious all the time.

My son noticed the difference and that is enough for me to keep going.

If this resonated and you are ready to start building more aliveness into your everyday life, Applied Enchantment is where I would point you.