When you were younger, what was your favorite way to play?

What’s your favorite way to play now that you’re older?

How many of us don’t have an answer to that second question because play seems “unimportant” and we “don’t have time for it?”

I find myself feeling like a mule or a machine, just plugging and chugging along each and every day doing what I assume is expected of me. When in reality, I’m the only one who truly expects these things out of myself but that’s another topic for another day…

Nonetheless, words go in, papers come out. Numbers get written down and calculations get made. I circle “a,” I circle “b” and every now and again I freak out when circling “d: none of these answers are correct.”

I wake up to the same alarm every day, generally around the same time.

While sitting in a coffee shop writing the previous sentence, I actually heard someone’s phone ring and it that happened to be the same as my alarm tone.

Cringe.

The cringe is because of hearing the alarm ringtone but it’s also because of this dull and monotonous routine that I’m realizing I sometimes find myself in.

What’s the difference between living to work and working to live? The general consensus is that Europeans work to live and Americans live to work.

We are workaholics. We even have an American T.V. show named after the term! It’s our cultural disease that prevents us from living in the present.

To live in the present is not the same as working in the present. We work in the present all the time but rarely leave time for pleasure and play. It’s no different than reading. Someone who enjoys reading for pleasure and makes time to read. Someone who does not enjoy reading simply says “I just don’t have time for it!” We find a way to make time for what we value.

I understand that recess is not a concept that can easily translate into a high school, college or work schedule/environment but I do believe that the principle of recess becomes increasingly more important as we move through life.

Adults tend to think that they have no use for recreation throughout their workday. However, on the contrary, children need it, live it, love it, breathe it and that’s why recess is incorporated into their structured schedules. They need the recess to burn off that mid-day energy and I’d also argue that some pretty valuable life lessons can be learned somewhere amongst monkey bars and tunnel slides.

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, MD, writes in his book Play that play is like oxygen in the sense that it is “all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or appreciated until it is missing.”

Play is a way to relieve stress, improve brain function, get exercise, keep you feeling youthful and it also stimulates creativity. I have a hard time finding a reason for why any of these benefits can’t be viewed as important and worth making time for.

You don’t always have to work hard to play hard.

I would argue that play is still work, for me at least.

Sometimes the hardest work is remembering to remind yourself not to take your matters so seriously and take a recess break every now and again.

As singer/songwriter Danielle Howle shared with one of my classes a few weeks ago: “People who don’t know how to have fun aren’t very good at anything else.”