Why Did We All Stop Playing?

I took this quote down in my inspiration journal and it comes from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation: “Mindfulness is not paying more attention but paying attention differently and more wisely with the whole mind and heart, using the full resources of the body and its senses.” I thought for a minute about why my yoga practice has become so important to me (spirituality aside, though you can never fully push that aside). I think it’s because, more than anything, it’s prompted me to treat my mind, heart, and body as helpful tools — counting on them to communicate with me, guide and focus me. We often forget these things are accessible to us to help teach and inspire decisions. We depend solely on external voices for that: doctors, blogs, celebrities, and the news. None inherently bad but also none inherently meant to compass a whole world.

Our bodies instinctively offer capabilities that allow us to attend to the world not more than we already do (because we don’t have space for that) but just in different, wiser, and more perceptive ways. We might have been better at this when we were young in terms of mindful movement. We moved our bodies in ways they wanted to move, and it was fun. We climbed. We flipped ourselves upside down. We danced and swam and knew what to do on a trampoline. And somewhere along the way, I think we lost our sense of play, traded it in for work or “proper exercise”, or squashed it altogether as inappropriate, immature.

Our free time is more limited the older we get, sure, and perhaps our energy, too. But we torture ourselves and punish our bodies by begrudgingly entering into movement. It is no longer play for the adult. But why couldn’t it be? We work out to lose weight or stay fit, often times beating into submission these bodies that were designed to play. And please don’t confuse my use of play for ‘easy’ or ‘fun’.

I learned early on that running long distances would majorly fuck up my knees — it was not a healthy weight bearing for my joints. In twenty-six years, I’ve never been inside a gym, because of the heavy equipment and intimidating contraptions. The crowded gym is not necessarily the place I feel safest to explore. You may be a runner or a gym junkie, and that’s amazing! I mean it. The point of this is to think about the full resources offered to you by your body. I’m always hearing influencers, media, etc. telling their audiences to just do this and just do that like their thing is one size fits all, and that’s an impossibility. We are different bodies with different needs. And I truly believe that if we’ll pay attention to our bodies more wisely, they’ll tell us exactly in what ways we ought to move.