In my previous post<\/a> I suggested that play\u00a0has no purpose \u2013 and encouraged us to make all of life more playful by incorporating more things that have no purpose at all!<\/p>\n

But, of course, the reality is that life is full of things that ‘have to be done’. I was going to enumerate some of them here \u2013 but, quite frankly, you hardly need me to remind you of all your obligations and the nagging demands on your time!<\/p>\n

(Often these ‘obligations’ are ones that we impose on ourselves. No one is demanding that I write this blog post \u2013 and no one would care if I didn’t \u2013 but just at the moment the struggle to articulate my thoughts feels much more like work than play!)<\/p>\n

More positively, much of what we do should<\/em> have a purpose. In the words of Sir Marcus Browning, MP (comic creation of Rowan Atkinson):<\/p>\n

Purpose is what we’re striving for. We must have purpose. We mustn’t be purposeless. We mustn’t exhibit purposnessless. We must be purposelessnessless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is is right that we don’t waste all the gifts we’ve been given \u2013 metaphorically burying them in the ground like the servant in Jesus’ parable of the talents \u2013 but rather use them to make a difference for good. To be the agents of change in the\u00a0 world, wherever and however we can.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, in the words of the old saying:<\/p>\nAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! <\/a><\/span>Click To Tweet<\/a><\/span>\n

Indeed, more than simply dull, but dulled, diminished, reduced:\u00a0less than the person we were created to be.<\/p>\n

Yes, we need to work \u2013 to do things with a purpose, an aim, a goal\u00a0\u2013 but we need to play too!<\/p>\n

I don’t subscribe to the idea of a ‘purpose driven life’. I don’t believe our lives should be ‘driven’. We are meant to be childlike, playful people.<\/p>\n

But how to be playful when there seems to be little enough time for work, let alone play?<\/p>\n

Firstly, choose<\/em> to take time to play<\/strong>. To do something for no other reason than the sheer joy and pleasure of doing so.\u00a0And we do have that choice. Not all of the time; perhaps not much of the time; but certainly some of the time. It’s simply a matter of priorities\u00a0\u2013 of whether we believe that play is important (HINT: Yes, it is! Very!)<\/p>\n

Secondly, given that we spend much of our time working,\u00a0make work more playful<\/strong>. By ‘work’ I mean, of course, more than paid (or, indeed, unpaid) employment \u2013 I mean anything we do in order to achieve something; anything we do for some reason other than the sheer joy and pleasure of doing so.<\/p>\n

And how do we do this? By incorporating into our work elements that have no purpose;\u00a0 things that are quite superfluous and unnecessary, and which play no part in the achievement of our goal\u00a0\u2013 but which add a little joy and pleasure.<\/p>\n

What might this look like in practice? I’ve got some ideas for an example \u2013 but that’s for another day!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thank you for reading this. Please do share with others, and let me know what you think. Thank you!<\/p>\n

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In my previous post I suggested that play\u00a0has no purpose \u2013 and encouraged us to make all of life more playful by incorporating more things that have no purpose at all! But, of course, the reality is that life is full of things that ‘have to be done’. I was going to enumerate some of… Continue reading How to Play?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[38,41,40],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2k38J-l7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1322,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions\/1322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.asachildbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}