Shenanigans, Tom Foolery and the Importance of Play

Or ... Don't Grow Up It's a Trap

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

Transmission

Are you having any fun?

What you getting out of living?

Who cares for what you’ve got if you’re not having any fun?

Are you having any laughs?

Are you getting any loving?

If other people do, why can’t you? Have a little fun.

From the song Are You Having Any Fun? – Elaine Stritch

What do we lose in growing up?

I’ve often wondered how it was that I misplaced my younger self. It’s like one day I simply abandoned her without so much as a goodbye.

Was I so eager to join the ranks of those who seemed responsible and wise beyond measure, even though they no longer asked for bedtime stories to be read?

I allowed my imaginary friends, which were really horses, disappear or fade into the background of my life. They became buried beneath the grind of the everyday average life of an adult. And I did it without afterthought because the reality is, that was what was expected of me.

That at some point I would transition from child to adult and no longer have a need for make-believe and imagination.

There’s an irony there for sure as I still love make-believe and imagination. So, have I not really made the transition? Or maybe I’m sliding backwards with age?

They say with age comes wisdom, so perhaps I am now wise enough to know I don’t want to grow up if it means no longer acknowledging there is a Universe full of magic around me every day.

Where once I made wishes on stars and created dragons out of clouds, and really, truly believed I could talk with animals, my moving from child to adult became focused on schoolwork, with subjects getting increasingly complex and farther away from the things I really wanted to learn.

And then there was the whole getting a job to have a value, and learning that what I produced, and how much I could produce, would be the label would wear in my adulthood. Add to that the pressure of going off and maintaining a life away from parents, engaging in relationships, and trying to adhere to societal norms, and I was a walking disaster mostly.

No one warned me about the unhappiness that would plague me and make me question myself too many times. No one told me that selling out to the machine, or the overlords, or whatever name you call the work we do to stay alive, would actually shrink my soul and prevent me from feeling my heartbeat for a very long time.

No one said it wouldn’t be a fair trade. Or that I should reject the notions that the more I acquire in things, the happier I would be. And the more money I made and the higher I rose in the corporate world, the better I would feel, were lies.

Instead, the process left me adrift in a sea between my childhood, and some altogether foreign but deemed necessary ground for me to travel.

To be clear, I did not have a perfect childhood, far from it in many ways, but during that time I found my solace in the company of Nature. Outside among the trees and plants, when I was too young to know I should not greet the dandelions with such reverence, I was able to escape the burdens abuse sets in the hearts of children.

I lost the part of myself that was hurting, in the hug of the damp earth after a rain. And felt Mother Nature hold me, while showing me all was never lost. I could run wild with the wild things, and there was never any judgement. And, the ground where so many of my tears fell would every year erupt in a magic carpet of flowers, capable of taking me on many an adventure born straight from my imagination.

Those days, those days of wandering far from the source of too great a pain, were a salve to the wounding I received being reminded daily how much I was not wanted.

It was the wonder and the awe, that at first seemed so childlike, which now feels like a life preserver.

Illumination

We need play.

We need time away from all the mundane and mindless things we do.

We need to shut off the technology and get outside and reconnect with Nature, to experience the world as we were when we were small. We need to wander and wonder again as if all of the possibilities are endless.

Our minds are powerful. They are capable of producing the world we wish to see. But they can also become prisons, when we don’t spend time laughing and for lack of a better word frolicking.

And I’m not saying the humor or laughter that belittles is what I mean. It’s the natural laughter that bubbles up from deep inside you, that has you bent over, holding your sides, trying to catch your breath. The stuff that comes from the humor of daily life.

My father told me never to take things too seriously. He said it wasn’t going to always be about me. That I needed to release my desire to control the outcome, so I could allow for things to show up as they were meant to be.

I learned to laugh because he taught me it was good to do so. I learned to play because he never let his adulthood stop him.

There were many summer nights, when the entire neighborhood of kids would come to our house to play a rousing game of poison ball. It meant one person was ‘it’ and carried a soccer ball, and everyone else hid or tried to outrun the person who was ‘it’. If you got hit with the ball, you were then ‘it’.

We never had the best lawn because of all the game playing. My father didn’t care about that. He wasn’t up early mowing, and he wasn’t applying all kinds of chemicals to the grass in order to grow some green badge of honor among the neighbors. His life was somehow deeper. But then, this was also a man who taught me how to talk with trees. So, it’s no surprise he saved his energy for the summer night shenanigans.

We moved to a neighborhood where there was a community pool. It was a far cry from the childhood of living close to the woods. The woods were still present, just farther away. Not as accessible. But the pool became a refuge in the summer for play as well. And of course, my father was the biggest kid. He was the first to play tag, or challenge the other kids to holding their breath the longest underwater. Sometimes to the dismay of other parents who didn’t want so much play around them.

One day, we came home from hours at the pool, and he started a towel fight. He rolled his bath towel up in such a way as it cracked when he flung it out … and if touched you, there was a sting. Well, soon enough my siblings joined in and before anyone knew it a towel went out too far and struck the lamp, a new lamp. And while we were new to the community, and the outside looked nice, we didn’t really have extra cash.

We watched in horror as the lamp crashed to the floor and broke. And then we heard my mother pull up in the driveway. I think my dad had the same look of fear in his eyes as we did. We were in such big trouble.

What surprised me then and makes me smile now, is when my mother tried to yell at us kids, and punish us, my father stepped up and admitted that it was his idea to start the fight in the first place. She scowled, as this took all of her ire off of us.

I remember the fight they had that night. How my father was irresponsible and how she demanded he grow up.

I laid in my bed hoping he never did.

Someone heard my pleas because he hasn’t. To this day his eyes twinkle with mischief making. And while he may not be running around the house instigating a pillow fight or some other such tomfoolery, his mind is still sharp, and his humor is as delightful as ever.

We even have this back and forth started so long ago I can’t remember. His birthday is twelve days after mine, so he finds cards that razz me about my growing older and writes little silly things in them to knock my age, knowing he is of course, always going to be older than me. I always wonder what the postpeople think when they read the outside of the card and it is addressed to ‘ye oldest person’, or some such other dig.

So, I throw a birthday party for him every birthday since he turned 80, the theme of which is based on age. One year it was ancient Egypt. Another year it was old growth forests, dinosaurs were a theme, and another year it was about antiques. Last year the theme was space and being billions of years old. And he was made to wear an astronaut helmet.

He is a great sport. 

The apple has never fallen far from the tree it seems.

The point here is that with all the good-natured joking, the adventures, the silliness, I learned that while life can certainly suck, there is always time for the shenanigans. As there should be.

I’ve met people who have no fun in their life. And by fun I don’t mean drinking with buddies or going out to fancy places. I mean the kind that is child-like. The kind that doesn’t really cost much.

We need play. We need laughter. We need to be rascals and get into good trouble sometimes.

We need to let go and find ourselves flat on our backs in an open field watching big, puffy clouds, scud overhead on the warm summer breeze, challenging one another as to what we see.

We need to marvel at the stars, and have fantastical conversations about what else might be out there. We need to watch for meteor showers, and look through telescopes, and have midnight picnics with fireflies, to remind ourselves that magic still happens.

All work and no play… what’s that saying again… something about being dull?

It’s more than that.

Being able to lean into being silly and wonderstruck means you are still malleable. You haven’t set yourself in stone, and that means you remain open to all that is and will be. The Universe is always teaching and always changing, so the more we can bend, and swerve, and remain like unmolded clay, the closer we will become to who we were meant to be.

We knew so many things in our childhood. So many truths that we were told to forget. So many things that could have made our world easier, if not better. We sacrificed them when we crossed the threshold, and we have not become better for it.

Imagination is a key to infinite possibilities. Those who keep it unlock a potential within that has been there since birth.

With imagination there is curiosity and with curiosity there is a willingness to play. To muck about. To smile and guffaw loudly no matter who is present.

Photo by Pagie Page on Unsplash

Transformation

Play isn’t just the action. Science reveals that play provides quite a few benefits from reducing stress to boosting happiness.

And if we could just get our obsessive desire to be right, out of the way, we could learn from Nature and its regard of play.

Sadly, we relegated play among other animals as something they do to learn skills they will need in adulthood. That’s fine and all, but what do you make of things they do that have no really relevant skill. Can we just, for once and for all, acknowledge that we just don’t know.

We can’t determine objectively why a polar bear or a dog goes up a snowy hill only to slide back down, over and over again.

We can’t determine objectively just why some sea lions and otters chase things such as shells or rocks, as if chasing a ball.

We don’t know why dolphins seem to have such fun surfing waves. Could it be because it IS fun to surf waves?

Why to whales breach? Why do they sing?

And what of bunnies who race around with the zoomies? Or any animal that has the zoomies for that matter?

And what of the animals that play with other species?

Our point of view can only be the human one and as such is loaded with indifference or ego-based assumptions. We have no idea why animals play, but play they do.

As Dr. Stuart Brown says – “The drive to play is as fundamental as our drives for food and sleep.’ That’s not just in humans. We have discovered circuits in the brain of other animals that wait to be activated.

What we do know is that in humans the lack of play increases depression, poor adaptability to changing conditions, lack of empathy, poor impulse control, and mood driven behavior – such as violence.

So whether you are playing ball with your dog, building a puzzle with friends, or laughing at silliness in your relationship to another human, it all matters. It all helps to diffuse tensions and relax us into our being state.

Life is serious enough for sure. And there are times when it will be impossible to smile, much less participate in play and shenanigans, but we should never go too long without experiencing some tomfoolery. It’s as important to us as the other things we do for our mental and physical health.

Pet names anyone? Who wants to paint some rocks? Who here has run into a pile of autumn leaves, or made snow angels?

Play is not competitive but rather invites us to a table where we can all, in our own way, experience well-being and better mood. Which then shifts the things that were dark from not rearing so large or taking up so much space in our brains.

My belief is that play is indeed vital to our health. People just seem happier when they engage in the delights we claim belong to childhood. We need to engage and indulge that inner child. That child is still within us. It may feel like they are gone, but one only has to reach beneath the layers of grownupness to find their child waiting. And your inner child, so wants to play.

As part of my own healing process from childhood traumas, I wrote a letter to my inner child as a way to reconnect to who I was before it all went down. In that letter I promised to keep my child-self safe, but I also promised to never let go of the desire to get silly. I never stop with my wonderment, my what if’s, my desire to always be expressive, spontaneous, and to never lose a zest for life.

So … who’s having the Teddy Bear Tea with the bubble wands… cuz I’m all in. I’ve got my own bear. :)

Here’s to all the shenanigans your heart can hold. May you have endless days in your life where you can dabble, wander, create and play. The world will be so much better for it.

Peace.