As promised, here is the second part of my blog about the importance of playing and this quote: ‘A sensitive person gets paid for playing. That’s the art of Life.’ Here is the part I of this post if you haven’t read it yet.
So as I said in the previous post, some traps are disguised as play. We can find them everywhere (for some reason, they are more common in wealthy countries)
Most of the time, when people talk about ‘play’, they say it in a transactional way. ‘Let’s play so we can be more creative, ‘play is good because it releases X hormone’ or ‘play to connect with your family. And not only with play but with other activities too, for example, dancing to be social, reading to be smarter, or even being nice to people to get something in return. I’m not saying that it is terrible to try to be more creative or it is wrong to play with your family so you can connect with them. But what I’m suggesting is the actual process of playing as an end of itself, not as a mean.
Being immersed and connected with what we do (some experts call it ‘flow’ (check this book here)). When we are in this state of flow, we are happier and less stressed, we lose track of time for a few moments, and for one instance, we seem to be at ease. So what if instead of playing so we can connect with our families, we played to enjoy the process. So when the time comes, we are so engaged in the game, and it’s so easy to play and have fun that, as a consequence, we connect more with our family, not because our ultimate goal was to get closer with them but simply because we enjoyed the game itself.
And if you think about it… What is the purpose of playing? It is not to win the game and be the best. Like in music, it is not about reaching the last note the fastest. It is about the process of playing. Enjoy the process of playing not because you will get something but because it’s fun.
How can we say ‘enjoy the moment’ if we can’t even enjoy what we do? How will we enjoy what we do if we always want to get something in the future? There will always be another song to dance to, a new game to play, and some extra work to do.
So it’s always good to remember that we have a limited amount of moves, so we might enjoy it because one day we will reach the end, and the game will be over.
Thanks a lot for reading this, and I hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions or want to talk more about this or other topics, just email me at info@thomasdixonmagic.com, and I’ll get back to you.
Stay magical 😉
Some book recommendations:
- Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety by Alan Watts
- The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell
- The Infinite Game: How Great Businesses Achieve Long-lasting Success by Simon Senik