An Invitation to Play
Remember when you were a kid?
Coloring outside the lines because what are lines? Just diving in, making “a mess”? Exploring the boundaries of your body: climbing, jumping, crawling, falling, getting up again. Running full steam ahead with no path, no purpose, just for the fun of it? Maybe you had a friend you played with and talked to who may not have existed in this realm?
Boundless, endless imagination.
Then you grew up. You muddied and fought through the socialization, pressures, and conditioning of middle and high school. The growing pains and painful realities of being young. Those older than you, and even your peers, telling you to “grow up,” that “you’re being immature,” “you’ll see when you get older,” “act your age.” At a small and tender age, you were encouraged, rushed, pressured, coerced into getting older faster.
When I was a Co-Executive Director of a very small youth-centered and youth-led organization years ago, part of our theory of change and approach to our work integrated a deep and alive understanding of the nuances of adultism. Adultism, like other systems of oppression, is the layered cultural and systemic practices and beliefs that forcibly control or deeply limit young people’s agency, autonomy, and self-determination. Young people are often positioned as naive, immature, frivolous, or incapable of knowing what they need, want, or understand about their own lives. And when young people are repeatedly told that their age-appropriate ways of knowing, moving, imagining, and making sense of the world are wrong or less valuable, we teach them which parts of themselves are welcome and which parts to abandon.
This is part of the tension in raising and supporting young people: how do we fiercely protect them while also honoring their joy, agency, creativity, and fire?
For those of us who survived childhood, we endured incredible feats to get here.* Across our different identities and lived experiences, many of us know, have experienced, and have deeply embodied what it feels like to be disempowered, to have our boundaries not honored, our bodily autonomy overridden, and our emotional well-being be up for scrutiny, correction, neglect, or disregard. Fewer of us know what it’s like to be held, cared for, co-regulated with, lovingly encouraged and redirected, scaffolded throughout our childhoods.
Some of us had our whimsy, our delight, our imagination, our boundless creativity, taken from us in childhood. The urge and push to “grow up” made us abandon age and developmentally appropriate parts of ourselves. Imagination, play, creativity became “immature” and “naive.”
But what if we were cared for and encouraged to embrace these parts of ourselves? What if there was an honoring that, as children, these were incredibly resilient and resourcing parts of ourselves? And what if they carried over to adulthood?
Having been a youth worker and in leadership development with adults, I long for play. I think we all do. Our dominant culture considers play “unprofessional.” We sit in long, dragged out meetings, slides and presentations…no color, no tactile engagement, just talking and listening. We’ve come to believe that adults need distilled, dry, colorless content, and lecture based learning.
What if we integrated play into this work? Into our leadership development. Visualization, body-based practices, making, art, movement, experimentation, storytelling, games, and different ways of engaging with self, others, and the world around us. Play as a way to practice curiosity, possibility, experimentation, learning, and growth.
It continues to be a practice for me too. Being able to play or embrace play comes with some deep self-reflection and undoing. Reconnecting to play can bring up feelings of embarrassment, perfectionism, silliness, vulnerability. It’s deeply uncomfortable. As a facilitator, I’ve had moments of having to commit myself to play. That if I believe it, in the content, the activity, the movement, even at my expense of feeling ridiculous, that builds trust and confidence to come along too.
So, when did we get so serious?
* Aurora Levins Morales wrote Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity. Her chapter, “The Politics of Childhood,” offers an incredible framing of the experience of being a child and shaped a lot of my thinking and practice with young folks.
