It’s not just me but I don’t think alot of people spend time “playing.”
I find it strange to drive around neighborhoods and see very few kids outside playing. I was fortunate that I grew up in a neighborhood where there was other kids my age to hang out with. We’d ride our bikes up and down the street seeing who else was outside and if there was enough of us we’d decide to do something. Sometimes there was enough of us to organize a game of some kind. We might play for hours or until one of us was called home, and when I mean called home it wasn’t our parents calling us on a cell phone it was usually Mom yelling down the street to get home or another Mom coming by and passing along a message from your Mom.
That’s how communication worked back then in neighborhoods, every Mom knew the other Mom’s and they all seemed to know each other’s phone number and even if my Mom didn’t know where I was it could be quickly determined where all the kids were hanging out by the Mom’s telephone network.
Sometimes the game we were playing devolved quickly due to arguing about the fairness of the teams or some rule interpretation but we’d do it all again the next day and the best thing was that it was all organized by us kids. There were no parents around to make every game an ultra-organized affair, in fact when a parent did get involved it was very awkward and I think most of us kids were thinking the same thing…..
“just leave us alone to figure it out”…….and usually we did
I’m not sure kids today have enough free time for play. Parents have over-scheduled organized activities for their kids that keep them busy all the time. We all know the parents who are constantly shuttling kids from soccer to dance to piano to karate to robotics to computer coding camp and on and on and on…….
As I grow older I find myself wanting to play more…..perhaps it’s just me trying to recall my youth or I realize that too much time is spent working or taking care of everyday life tasks like taking the car for an oil change or cleaning the leaves out of the gutters. Of course there are ways for adults to play……pickleball seems to be wildly popular and golf is always an activity that adults can enjoy as they age but I find myself wanting to walk more, ride my bike more, go on hikes.
A couple of years ago I bought a kite and on a perfectly windy spring day I flew my kite……I ran with it and launched it and watched as it caught the wind and climbed higher as I released more string. I watched the kite dance on the breeze dipping and swirling, often I had to pull quickly on the string to prevent a full nose dive….it was exhilarating in ways that are hard to describe……yes I felt like a kid again wanting the kite to stay aloft and hoping the string was strong enough and wouldn’t break in the spring breeze. Neighbors driving by were probably perplexed to see me standing there flying a kite but it was joyful and quite frankly I didn’t care what they thought….they might even have been jealous or not, it didn’t matter because as a kid it didn’t matter what other’s thought when you were playing, all that matter was that you were doing it and doing is much better than not doing and besides I’m not ready for pickleball
Peace and Love
John
John's Blog 