Play & The Nature Of Fun
by Katrina Bos
How do we experience joy in our lives? In our spiritual journey, we talk about joy... but what if the answer seems childish according to the world? What if we need to learn how to play again? What is the true nature of fun? How does this heal us? How do these things guide us on our path of Satya?
Transcript
So today we're talking about the importance of fun and play in life.
Why should we talk about this?
Why is this interesting?
You know what's interesting about humanity right now,
About society,
Is for all intents and purposes pretty dysfunctional.
It's when we find certain things that we really love and we're happy about it,
It's kind of not the norm.
It's very special.
If you meet someone who's very happy and light-hearted,
They're quite almost exotic creatures.
Like how did you end up this way?
Like were you born in a golden cage?
Why are you so happy?
In our society,
And it's interesting because I'm writing my book,
The Union of the Masculine and Feminine,
And the three big things that really come up for me,
That come up for me in that book,
Is this foundation of this curious patriarchy.
And I don't mean just men oppressing women,
I mean the oppression of the masculine energy over the feminine energy.
And we'll talk about that today.
But also the idea that we're separate from each other and this curious desire to dominate each other.
And because of all this happening for the last couple millennia,
Or for as long as maybe we have recorded history,
We're really depressed and upset and anxious.
And we've sort of normalized a really difficult life.
We've normalized anxiety and we've normalized the drudgery of work.
So then all of a sudden somebody says,
Well you should have more fun.
And we think,
What are you talking about?
I have so many responsibilities.
Do you have any idea how hard my life is?
Do you have any idea how busy I am?
I don't have fun.
I don't have time for fun or play.
The whole idea of it has been relegated to something that is unnecessary and nonsense and not valuable and a waste of time.
But you know in the immortal words of Dr.
Phil,
How's that working for you?
It's not working for us.
This belief or this system that we've sort of internalized that life is about work,
Responsibilities,
Drudgery,
Suffering,
This is normal.
Play and fun,
That's for children.
And even then we should just tell them what they should be doing.
Like even children having fun and having unstructured play time has kind of gone the way of the dodo.
By and large there's always groups of people who are like no no no we need to still expand the child soul and Waldorf interesting groups and Steiner.
There's interesting things out there that still do that.
But by and large we're becoming more and more and more and more structured.
And suddenly play has become playing games on our phone or on the computer or things like that.
The other thing I want to mention,
I'm just going to throw this out there because I don't actually have an answer about this.
So this past weekend I organized a Euchre tournament in Goderich.
And Euchre is a card game that is not actually around the world.
I didn't know that.
It's a particularly I don't know North American,
British,
I don't know where it all comes from.
But it's a really fun game and I've been playing it since I was a kid.
And you play it with partners.
And so I set up a progressive Euchre tournament in Goderich that anybody could come to.
And the idea was that the partners who win the game,
Like this is a short game,
If they win the game they get up and they move to another table.
You change partners and you meet different people.
And my whole idea was just to have fun.
Like I just wanted to get out and have fun with a pile of people,
Strangers,
Friends,
Whoever.
But the whole intention was fun.
Well the weird thing about Euchre is there are a lot of people who play Euchre and they're no fun.
You play with five cards and then you play them out.
You try to get tricks right.
You just that's how you win.
There are people that you play Euchre with and as soon as you're finished the hand they analyze what you did.
Well why did you play the queen?
That's ridiculous.
You should have played the ace.
You should have played the nine.
You knew they were and they start analyzing what you did.
And they take the fun out of it.
And oftentimes people who I've met people who hate playing Euchre and I always wonder because I love playing Euchre.
I'm a real card player,
Games player.
I love all that stuff.
I always wonder have you only played with people who sucked the fun out of it?
Have you ever played with anybody who didn't care whether they won or lost?
Like have you ever played with anybody who just wanted to play because it was fun to hang out with their friends?
So it was a real decision that I had to make before the night whether or not we would keep score because I partnered with a local restaurant and that's where we had it and then they had snacks and appetizers and drinks.
It was like so much fun and they had said to me well what's your what's going to be the big prize for the winner?
Are you going to have men's high,
Women's high,
All this you know and you know what are you going to do with the scoring?
And I had to really sleep on that and meditate on it and think well I don't want there to be any scoring.
I just want us to have fun like I want us to score enough inside the game that we know whether or not we move to the next table or not.
But why do we have to have a winner?
Because of course the opposite of that is we have to have a loser.
Why?
That's not why I'm playing.
I don't care.
I don't want to make anyone feel like a loser and I don't want anyone to feel like a winner and it's really interesting because I was thinking about this as I was putting together this talk and I don't have an answer for this and I'm kind of just putting it out to you to maybe ponder in the ethers or we can talk about it at the end in the Q&A part but whether or not you can have fun without being competitive against other people because at the end of the night so anyway I decided that we would not have a scorecard and everyone was just going to move to the next table to have fun and meet new people and nobody was going to win or lose the evening.
Well most people were just fine with this but there were some that were ticked.
They were so upset.
They were like well I'd like to know whether I'm winning or not or and they really like they came to me later and they're like,
Kachina we need to have prizes and I said to the whole group at the end because people were really complaining about it and I said and I got up and I spoke to the room and I said well I know there's people who would like to have prizes.
I said one of the challenges is we're not taking in any money for this to buy prizes.
People paid ten dollars to get in but all the money was donated to a local charity so I said there's no money for prizes.
Do you want me to buy you a prize?
Like for what?
I don't understand.
Like genuinely I don't relate to that competitive desire in playing a game.
So it was a very interesting thing that it almost felt like on some level we've forgotten how to play.
We've forgotten just how to have joy.
It was funny my I have a friend Shannon Hugman who some of you guys have met.
She's a brilliant astrologer.
She's traveling the world right now.
She's so cool and in our class last week she said she had just read the book Mutant Message Down Under and I know you guys know I quote this book all the time and she reminded me of another passage that I had forgotten which now I want to go and reread the book but there was this one point where everybody started playing together.
So of course so the premise of the book is that this New York journalist goes down to Australia and she wants to write an article about the aboriginals.
She ends up going on a six-month walkabout with them and learning all about their real culture and so of course it's called Mutant Message Down Under because we are the mutants because we've forgotten what it is to be human.
So she's the mutant and she's going to take a message from these people and bring it back to society.
Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan.
Highly recommend this book.
Again I haven't read it in 30 years but now I want to reread it.
Once my manuscript is in I'm going to like read like crazy.
The story they told they started playing and she was having all kinds of fun playing with the with the tribe with the people and then they said well could you teach us one of your games and she said sure okay well uh let's do a race.
We'll start here and we'll run over there and see who wins and they said who wins?
Like what does that mean?
Well the fastest person wins and the slowest person loses and they said why would you play a game where everyone doesn't win?
It was beyond their comprehension that she would play a game that would center people out as having been winners or losers.
It was just beyond them and so it was just fascinating that you know she got telling us this story as I was putting together this Euchre tournament and then I did the Euchre tournament without winners and losers and people were all upset.
So it's an interesting little thing inside of us in the land of why as a society don't we know how to have fun anymore?
It's like we're so accustomed to being graded on everything we do because we started getting graded around age four in school so everything is attached to the outcome of what we're doing.
Everything we do we couldn't just be doing it for the joy of doing it.
There has to be a purpose.
We couldn't just paint because it's we love the smell of paint legit like we love the smell of the paint.
We love the feeling of the stroke of the brush on the canvas.
We love the colors.
We love the creation process.
We couldn't just do it for that reason.
We'd have to sell it.
We have to have a reason.
There's something fundamentally amok with how we interpret the world that's getting in the way of our ability to play and have fun.
So part of this is this weird patriarchal energy and again not gendered here just this weird idea that all that is masculine is important and all that is feminine is not important.
Logic is important but the arts and intuition are not important.
Like the sciences are important but the arts aren't important.
Giving is important.
Receiving isn't.
The one who is speaking is more important than the one who is listening.
The one who is in power is more important than the people of the community.
We have this idea that only what is masculine is valuable.
Everything else isn't and of course where would play fall in that continuum?
Unstructured joy.
That's definitely on the feminine side of things.
So originally I went to university and got a math degree so it's not that I don't like the structure right.
My brain loves that but then 10 years later I went back to university to study psychology after I had the whole experience with the breast lumps and healing and learning about the alternative world and the expansive world that my teacher taught me and things.
People started coming to me for counselling and of course I had no training or anything I just had experiences and perceptions I guess.
So I went back to school to study psychology because I thought this would be reasonable and you know responsible.
At the beginning it was really interesting because we were allowed to study Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl and people who really included all of the human experience.
Spirituality,
Joy,
Fun,
Play,
Everything.
It wasn't just about behavioral conditioning and operant conditioning and all this kind of thing.
But as the years went on,
Like I completed two years of it,
But by the third year we were no longer allowed to study these people.
Everything came down to what could be proven through studies with monkeys and rats.
If you could make a monkey do it then it was valuable.
If you could make a rat do it it was valuable.
And I couldn't quite figure it out.
I had this dissonance going on in my head thinking I don't understand.
We're not monkeys or rats.
We are these huge multi-dimensional beings.
What in the world does that have to do with being human?
Well what was happening was psychology wanted to be considered a real science.
A real science.
And they wanted to be taken seriously.
They didn't want to be a soft science.
So they had to be able to prove things in repeatable experiments.
Hence the use of monkeys and rats.
But of course they deleted all the humanity.
They included everything that could be programmed into our animal brain.
But that's not all who we are.
In fact the greater part of us has nothing to do with that.
You know in all of our talks about quantum reality and the true nature of being human and our spiritual integration and being empaths and being telepathic,
None of this can be proven in a lab because it's multi-dimensional.
It doesn't fit in a 3D model that's repeatable.
Even quantum physics,
The experiments are not repeatable.
That's the problem.
That's us.
We are made of quantum particles.
Not repeatable.
So it's a very curious thing that even our understanding of psychology,
Which is us.
Psychology is human,
Human behavior.
This is us.
Our understanding of us has been relegated to that which can be proven using experiments,
Using monkeys and rats.
And that idea has sunk into the zeitgeist,
Has sunk into the perception of what it is to be alive.
If it can't be counted,
It's not valuable.
If it can't be measured,
If it can't be of some earthly good to some boss somewhere,
Or if you can't put a money ticket on it or money value on it,
It's not valuable.
In this world,
Emotions aren't important.
Insight isn't important.
Spidey senses aren't important.
And the funny thing is,
The question is,
Why have we lost connection with that?
It's in every one of us.
Every one of us has connections to the multi-dimensional multiverse through our emotions,
Our insight,
Our mystical nature.
Every single one of us has this ability.
And yet somehow we've lost connection to it.
It's the difference between being trained to be factory workers,
And again,
Nothing against factory,
Working in a factory,
But the mentality that the goal in life is to get up,
Do the thing,
Do the thing,
Do the thing,
Do the thing,
Do the thing,
Go to bed,
Wake up,
Do it again,
Do it again.
This has been so put into our head that this robotic existence is normal.
The key is to try to optimize it so you make the most money,
Or you're the most successful.
But what about being a mystic?
What about living in the unanswered question?
What if this is where play comes in?
Unstructured play.
But can you imagine,
You're sitting in your house and you have a day off,
And you don't know what to do.
And let's say you don't look at your phone,
And you don't have a TV,
And you're not going to watch Netflix,
Or play video games,
Or anything.
You're in a cabin in the woods.
What are you going to do?
What's fun?
What's play for you?
What's light?
There's nothing to accomplish.
There's no one to judge you,
Or give you a high five if it's good,
Or not like it if they don't.
What do you do?
Well,
One of the interesting philosophies to think about is another foundational philosophy of our current patriarchal zeitgeist,
Our patriarchal idea that we're living within,
Is an idea called tabula rasa.
I'm going to type it in the chat here.
Tabula rasa.
And what this means,
It literally means a slate that's been rubbed clean,
But we just interpret it as a blank slate.
So this idea of tabula rasa has been around for a long time,
That as children we are born blank slates.
So the education system is there to fill in that blank slate.
That's why the children are sort of treated like empty vessels that you now place a curriculum before them,
And let them absorb it,
Because that's our job.
It's just a philosophy.
It's just something that we've sort of somehow come to believe as normal.
Of course,
It also really works in this domination paradigm that everyone who you're dominating is nothing.
They're just blank slates.
They're not interesting,
Sentient beings.
They're just blank slates to kind of serve the masses,
Or serve the masters,
Right?
So what's really interesting about this is,
Now imagine here you are in this cabin in the woods.
If you believe that you are tabula rasa,
You won't know what to do with yourself,
Because you're like,
Well,
Are there any books?
Are there games?
Is there something I can do?
Because I'm blank.
We believe we're blank,
But what if we're not?
What if children come in fully formed,
Fully juicy,
Interesting beings?
What if we come in with hundreds of lifetimes of experience?
What if there's no such thing as the time-space continuum,
And all our lifetimes are happening right now?
What if we literally have access to the entire universe if we just close our eyes?
It's an entirely different perception.
So now if we go with the idea that we are not tabula rasa,
We are the universe in human form,
Now what are you going to do?
Anything we want.
We're going to go for a walk.
We're going to smell the roses.
We're going to watch the chipmunks.
We're going to go for a swim.
We're going to draw a picture.
And we're not going to draw a picture because we want to impress someone.
We're going to draw a picture because something is rising inside of us to be created.
We are this infinite well of ideas and possibilities and potential,
But we have to get back to it.
We have to get back to that.
And what is the number one way to get back to that unstructured potential that we are?
Play.
Just letting ourselves freewheel with no rules,
No nothing.
This is the powerful value of play.
And I know we're having a serious talk about play,
Which is hilarious,
But I think we have to be a little serious about it at first.
That this is really real.
Without the spirit of play,
We won't access the rest of who we are.
We will focus on what we learned in school.
We'll focus on what our family thinks is important.
We'll focus on what makes us money.
We'll focus on what makes us skinny or fit or whatever it is that we have in our head that we have to do.
Play breaks out of that paradigm.
It is so powerful.
If we can't play,
We can't access all of the unknown within us.
That being said,
I'm going to go on to a different idea.
At some point we have to really ask ourselves,
What is the point of being alive?
It's always funny.
Some of you guys met Nelda.
And whenever I am questioning the meaning of life,
Because it would happen,
What am I doing her?
I would go to her and she would say,
She would just sit there very quietly,
Kind of look out the window.
Then she'd look at me and she'd say,
I don't think you're having enough fun in life.
It's always funny to me,
The idea that if we're having fun,
We're not questioning the meaning of life.
But if we're not having any fun,
We question the meaning of life.
So what if the meaning of life is to have fun?
What if that's the connection?
What if that's the point?
Now,
Of course,
We have to look at the world we live in.
The world we live in is set up for us to work.
Work,
Work,
Work,
Work,
Work,
Work,
Work.
One would believe that the meaning of life is to work.
The meaning of life is to make money.
Because that's what we spend the majority of our waking hours doing.
Oh,
But we need money,
Blah,
Blah,
Blah.
I know,
I get it.
But philosophically,
When we look at what we believe the meaning of life is,
If we were to look at what's actually showing up on the earth,
One would believe that we believe the meaning of life is working.
We have to look at that.
And we have to look at why we work so much.
And again,
I don't see this as a personal thing.
I'm not like,
Why are you working so much?
And you're like,
I have to pay the bills.
What are you talking about,
Crazy lady?
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about we as a society.
So Buckminster Fuller,
I love reading his stuff.
And he used to say that work was ridiculous.
He actually used to say that the very fact that we've normalized this drudgery,
Creating all these jobs that don't even exist,
They're not even real,
They actually contribute nothing to society.
It's just they're just moving things from pillar to post and then moving them back.
I remember hearing a story,
Deepak Chopra actually recorded this story.
And it was a story of King Arthur meeting Merlin.
And so when Arthur was a young boy,
He went to stay with Merlin to learn about magic and life and everything.
He went to Merlin and Merlin said,
Okay,
First day,
He says,
I want you to go out there in the yard.
And I want you to dig a ditch.
I want it to be six feet deep.
I want it to be six feet wide,
And 20 feet long.
But Arthur's like,
But I'm here to learn magic.
I'm here to learn about being human.
Like,
What are you what are you talking about being a wizard,
Which I believe is being human,
By the way.
And Merlin said,
This is this is what you have to do.
So he went out there and for two days,
Dug and dug and dug and dug,
Dug this huge long ditch,
Came back in,
Said to Merlin,
Okay,
I've done,
I'm done.
What's the next thing I should do?
He said,
Okay,
I want you to go outside in the yard.
And I want you to fill in the ditch that you just dug.
But I just don't don't say anything.
Just go do it.
Fine.
He goes out,
Fills the ditch in,
Comes back in the next day.
Okay,
Now what he goes,
Okay,
I want you to go out into the yard.
And I want you to dig a ditch six feet wide,
Six feet deep and 20 feet long.
Arthur's like,
What?
And he went and did it again.
And of course,
He had to go and fill it in again.
And Arthur's like,
I don't understand.
And Merlin's like,
Welcome to the human existence.
We spend so much time digging ditches,
Just to fill them in,
Just to dig them again,
Just to fill them in the amount of time that we as humans spend wasting energy,
Resources,
Time,
Thought,
Hope,
Everything.
And the hard thing is so much of our society is created out of jobs that do nothing but dig ditches and fill them in again.
And you get in your car,
And you drive to work,
And you dig the ditch and you drive home.
And you go to work and you fill the ditch in,
You drive home.
Money is changing hands.
Money is you're digging the ditch,
You're getting money,
The money's going to the bank is coming in like it's happening.
But nothing is actually contributing to society.
There's nothing new being created.
Nobody was fed.
How many jobs are managers of managers of managers of managers?
So it's a very interesting world we're living in to try to ask this question of how do we balance work and play.
That's why I'm bringing this up.
Because we're kind of living in this very strange virtual false world,
Where the majority of things we do actually have no meaning either.
And so let's imagine a different world.
Let's imagine a world where we don't have this false,
Virtual,
Strange world based in money.
It's like when you think of stock markets and mutual funds and this entire industry based in we would call economy,
And none of it's real.
Half of it doesn't even deal with real money.
It's literally just an idea here and an idea there.
It's like one of my favorite all time movies is the movie Michael with John Travolta,
Where he plays an angel.
And he plays the archangel Michael.
It's such an epic movie.
And there's this great part where they're in the car and he's in the back back of the station wagon,
And the radio's on.
And the radio announcer says,
And this week,
Hog futures are up.
Michael just starts busting a gut.
He's smoking a cigarette,
This angel wings out the back and he's just like,
Hog futures are up.
Like this is so much of our world.
And I'm not saying we aren't we aren't in this kind of utopic world yet.
I believe it's coming,
But we're not there yet.
But just to be able to be clear about what we're really dealing with here.
So now let's imagine we live in a village where we actually only work to create what's needed in the village.
Needed.
We're not working for someone so they can make a lot of money.
There's no uber wealthy people who you work for so that they can get more money and more money.
It's not like that.
We live like let's say everybody that's here right now.
We all created a village.
So what do we need?
Well,
We need shelter,
We need food,
We need maybe we need entertainment.
Maybe we need someone to watch the children,
We need someone to,
I don't know,
Hunt for food or grow the gardens or whatever.
Do you know how little time it would take for all of us to make this happen?
How little time in the day all of us would have to work to do this?
And when you even think about this work in air quotes,
Well,
The person who loves to garden and get their hands dirty would garden.
And the person who loves to forage for vegetables and berries would forage for vegetables.
And the person who loves to build things would build houses.
And the person who loves playing with children would take care of the children.
And the person who loves to cook would love to cook.
So suddenly what we call work is joy and play and play and growth and expansion.
No one's doing drudgery.
Maybe we take our turns cleaning out the toilets and things,
But it's not like that because we're not feeding any big corporations.
We're not feeding,
There is no,
Again,
It comes back to this,
There is none of this domination paradigm that we are feeding.
We're actually just living.
There's no hierarchy.
It's like we all live in some weird multi-level marketing scheme where the money just keeps flowing to the top and the people at the bottom get nothing and everyone up top just keeps getting fed and getting fatter and fatter and fatter metaphorically.
It's just an interesting thing to hold in our hearts.
Well,
What would play look like if it was effortlessly integrated with contributing to the community?
It's a huge question.
What do I want to do with my life?
I don't like my job anymore because we're having these existential crises and realizing my job,
I don't even do anything.
Not really.
So what can I do?
And I truly believe that the world we're moving into is created by the consciousness of every single person in it.
I don't think it's going to be top down.
I think it's each one of us going out there and saying,
What do I love to do?
What feels like play to me?
And we're not like superimposing play.
We're not telling ourselves positive affirmations to make ourselves like the job we have.
Genuinely,
What feels like play?
But of course,
To know this,
We have to play.
We actually have to give ourselves unstructured time to explore this mystery inside with no attachment to outcome,
Just play.
So now imagine we're living in this beautiful village that I truly see in my heart and mind.
So maybe we contribute to the village a couple hours a day through work or I mean,
Through gardening or gardening or feeding people or caring for others or whatever,
But it's all a community thing,
Right?
What do we do the rest of the time?
Because this is the other interesting question.
Well,
If I'm not working,
What else do I do?
And we can see how lost we are in the play concept,
Because if we don't have work to do,
And we can't sit on our phones and scroll and we can't watch Netflix and we can't watch TV and we can't play on our computers,
We don't know what to do.
Suddenly we're bored.
How can we be bored?
Human beings should never be bored,
But we are,
Because we've been conditioned that we're blank slates that require entertainment,
Or we need someone to tell us what to do and what to think.
We have to start playing,
And it doesn't matter what it is.
Yeah,
It could be learning an instrument,
Learn a new language,
But it has to be fun.
We don't do it because we should.
We don't do it because we should be musical or we should be artistic or we should know five languages.
Would it be fun for you to learn a new language?
Like I love doing Latin dancing,
So the idea of learning Spanish is super fun,
Because then I'll know more words than just corazon,
Which means heart,
Because you hear that a lot.
Mi corazon.
That's the only stuff I know in Spanish,
But to actually learn Spanish because then I can sing along with my favorite Spanish songs and dance my Latin dancing.
How much fun is that?
Or if you're going to go traveling,
Travel to a new country and learn the language ahead of time and be able to kind of talk a little bit with people.
If you think that's fun,
It's not fun for everybody.
It's super fun for me.
That just floats my boat like nobody's business,
But it may not be fun for you.
Maybe what you want to do is go and maybe learn a local craft and do something else,
But what is it?
What is it that we love to do?
Maybe we do love playing games.
Maybe we love playing with children.
Maybe we love playing with adults.
Maybe we love playing with animals.
Maybe we love just sitting quietly watching the world go by.
That can be fun.
You know,
It's interesting if we want to learn about play,
It's very interesting even to study what they've looked at for children.
They've really structured the study of play in children,
But even that is so interesting and we're going to talk about it,
But to really know that if we're talking about understanding the growth process in children,
Why does this not apply to us?
Why is the growth important in children but not in us?
So one of the things I learned in university when I went back to study psychology for the two years I was there,
I was sitting,
I've talked to you guys about this a few times,
I'm sitting in this class and it was just like a basic psychology class and they were talking about something called myelination in the brain and the idea that when we're born we literally are just this clump of,
Well maybe one,
Like we're a gray neuron and these neurons flow,
They go through the body and they all create all the different cells that we require.
It's such an amazing thing,
But if you look at the brain,
The brain begins as all these gray,
Gray,
Almost raw electrical signals.
Like I always think of it like a raw electrical wire and there's just this mass,
Which is why as babies we're kind of just trying to sort out the world.
But as soon as we start to do something,
We start to go ba ba ba ba da da da,
We start learning that oh I can make sound,
That's interesting.
So as soon as I start doing that ba ba ba,
This tempor,
The temporal lobes here in the brain start to myelinate and myelinate means that a myelin sheath,
Which just it's just a white sheath,
Forms over the gray matter and it creates white matter.
Now white matter in my mind is like putting electrical tape over that raw wire.
It protects it,
It creates a super highway so that now once I learn something it becomes done.
It's like sitting down and the first time you try to tie your shoes it's like trying to sort out your gray matter and I can't do it because I can't connect my thoughts with my fingers and the laces and it doesn't make any sense.
But the brain's getting a message that says aha she wants to know how to tie her shoes and you go to sleep and you wake up the next morning and your fingers know how to do it because that part of the brain has myelinated and it now knows how to do it and that's how we learn.
And so I'm sitting there in this class and they're talking about how the myelination process is very heavy in children and then it goes on until you turn about 19 and then the myelination process slows down and I'm sitting there thinking no it doesn't.
That doesn't make any sense.
Like you know when someone says something and it's not true that's all I know.
I don't have any proof of it.
I've never even heard of the concept of myelination before but I knew that what he was saying wasn't true.
There was no magical number that at 19 this process would end unless we stopped learning.
What if at 19 we now get honed,
We get channeled into something even if we go on to study at college and university we are now only acting within our gifting.
We're only acting within this channel.
We're not learning anything new.
We're not playing anymore.
We're not going out and being unstructured and seeing what else is interesting.
So there's no other parts of the brain that have to myelinate.
So the last part of this story which is that Einstein when Einstein died they wanted to study his brain and what they found is it was the most myelinated brain they'd ever seen.
Both sides both hemispheres were extremely myelinated and down the center between the two brains is a nerve patch called the corpus callosum and the corpus callosum allows the conversation between the left and the right brain and his corpus callosum was pure white matter and what's interesting about Einstein is he loved to play.
He loved to ponder.
Work was play for him.
Everything he did he was playing.
He was pondering.
He loved to play games and he loved to play the violin and and even all the funny pictures of him.
You kind of get a sense that he actually was a pretty funny guy and even if I study the the times he was at the big lectures with all the physicists and stuff in Copenhagen and things he always would present things with a bit of a twinkle in his eye.
You know it's like a brilliant genius of our time.
He knew how to play which meant he was always he was always growing and expanding.
It's very very important.
So one of the things when you study play in children and this is oh and this is why I wanted to say that is because this assumption that play is only important in children I believe is faulty.
It's important if we now become air quote adults and we no longer play,
We no longer grow,
We no longer expand,
We no longer have any fun because we simply join the machine.
We're just robots now.
So it's interesting and you know there's a lot of different theories out there about play but one of them is the importance of unstructured play.
Just put a child in a room,
Put a child in a backyard in a forest.
What will they do?
Well the way they describe it is that they'll probably just look around at stuff.
Pick up rocks and check it out.
Maybe they'll pile them up and down up all over each other and maybe they'll throw rocks in a lake or maybe they'll do funny tumbles and gymnastics and who knows what they'll do.
Who knows what we would do?
Like imagine giving ourselves a day completely unstructured,
No distractions,
No technology.
What would we do?
Sometimes this is just puttering around the house and it's fun.
Just puttering,
Very joyful,
Don't have to get anything done,
Not cleaning the house for other people,
Just puttering.
So again,
Lots of you guys met Nelda.
She always jokes and she'll probably say it one day when she comes on here,
Is that her favorite thing when she doesn't know what to do is she just sorts her underwear drawer.
This is great fun for her.
It's very enjoyable.
Like what do you really love to do?
What's really fun?
And again it doesn't have to be skydiving or painting.
It could be sorting your underwear drawer.
It could be looking through cookbooks.
It could be anything we want.
It could be playing on an Etch-a-Sketch.
Then they describe solitary fun.
You just say you're just alone.
What is it?
What do you love to do alone?
Do you love to read?
Fun.
What is fun for you to do alone?
Do you love to write?
Do you love to draw?
Do you love to paint?
Do you love to run?
Do you love to swim in the lake?
Do you love to think about things?
Do you like to philosophize?
Do you like to wander?
Imagine just putting your shoes on,
Walking outside the door and wandering aimlessly for the day.
No idea where you're going.
Just gonna wander aimlessly.
Maybe I'll bring some snacks or maybe I'll just randomly go for food if I want.
Imagine I live in a little town of 8,
000 people.
Imagine if I put my shoes on in a backpack with a bit of money.
No phone,
No nothing.
Not going to document it and post it on Instagram.
I'm just going to walk out the door and return when the streetlights come on.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine how much fun that would be?
Why don't we do that?
Why don't we just walk outside and just wander?
Then they talk about parallel play,
Where children play but they're not really playing together.
They play side by side.
What if there's something you love to do that's parallel play?
It's like,
You know,
They have those gatherings where you go and you paint a picture and everybody sits and they paint a picture and drink wine and have fun together.
It's parallel play.
We're all going to do this together.
There's a lot around here.
There's a lot of running groups.
They love going running together.
I'm a solo runner but some people love running in a group or maybe they like going for a bike ride on a Sunday.
Huge group of 10 people,
You know,
Biking down the highway.
You know,
What do you love doing parallel to other people?
Because there's joy in that too.
Then they have associative play.
Sorry,
I'm getting such a giggle about all these serious words about play.
But associative play is when you actually are interacting with the other people around you.
You know,
Whatever it is you're doing,
Maybe you're playing cards,
Maybe you're playing a game,
Maybe you're doing a jigsaw puzzle,
Maybe you're.
.
.
Like who knows what you're doing.
But you're actually playing with other people.
Well,
What do you love to do with other people?
You know,
Maybe it's us all dancing together.
You know,
What do we love to do?
Maybe it's swimming at the beach,
Theater groups,
Great fun.
Then they have cooperative play.
And this is when we actually create something together and that may be more like the theater or things like that.
But you actually are playing together.
Like my daughter and I love to sit in jigsaw puzzle.
Love it.
That is to me so much fun.
So much fun.
It is not fun for everyone,
But it is so much fun for me and her.
Like we literally almost shake.
It was like,
Oh my God,
We're gonna put this puzzle together.
We're so excited.
And then we just like,
We're just so excited.
You know,
We make hot chocolate and it's so much fun and put on fun music.
And the last kind of play,
Which was really interesting to me,
And I had to really think about it.
They called it onlooker play.
And this is for the children who for some reason are sitting at the side and they're watching the other people play.
And of course,
Sometimes people think,
Oh,
There's something wrong with the child.
The child's not playing.
They're not interacting with their peers or something wrong with this.
But the message actually was,
This is also a kind of play.
And I don't mean being a perpetual spectator.
That's not it.
But it's fun to watch people.
And sometimes it's fun to watch people play.
I'm not a sports person,
But when my son was in high school,
He played a bit of rugby.
I loved watching rugby.
I just loved watching these kids run at top speed down the field.
There was just something so primal and exciting about it.
Just,
Oh,
I loved it.
So it's an interesting thing to ponder play and to really think,
You know,
What can I do that hasn't been set up by someone else for me to do?
Like it's okay to play other people's games,
But to also,
If we want to expand,
If we want to really expand as humans,
What do I love to do that has nothing to do with anybody else?
I'm going to put my glasses on.
If anyone has any questions,
I'm really happy to answer them.
I'd love to learn to play and have more fun in life,
But I get a bit put off when social media makes it all feel like a competition to see who's having the most fun or the biggest degree of fun.
I'm trying to stay open of learning new ways to have fun and soak in your joy.
Right?
I know,
It's like,
That's what I mean,
Like we've even taken fun to something crazy.
I'm more fun than you and look what I accomplished and you should make everything fun and everything should be,
It's just like,
Oh,
Just stop.
Or that this is more fun.
Oh,
It's crazy.
And the funny thing is everybody's different.
People really are introverts,
Extroverts.
Some people love to go out and play with others and some people love to sit at home in the bathtub,
Reading a book or sitting,
Watching the dog play.
We need more porches on our houses so we can just sit and watch the world.
All of this is fun.
There's no,
There's no,
Oh,
That doesn't sound like very much fun.
I wouldn't enjoy doing that.
What?
Well,
Then don't do it.
I mean,
One of the tricks to figure out what we like to do for fun is to ask ourselves,
What did we like to do as children?
And I have asked myself this a thousand times.
What did I like to do before I decided to be all responsible?
And it's an interesting question.
And for me,
It actually,
Ironically,
Does generally come down to solitary things.
It comes down to reading and puzzling and writing and kind of doing my own thing.
I do enjoy being with other people for sure,
But I don't really like social settings.
I actually find them very stressful.
And it's an interesting thing to come to who you really are.
This is just me.
This is just the world a la Katrina.
Not everybody,
Just me.
And every one of us is completely unique.
You know,
I find parties very exhausting and I actually act weird.
And I come home going,
Why did you talk like that?
Did I promote it with my own kids?
What type of play did I encourage?
You know what?
With my kids,
I did encourage play.
Like for example,
We used to go camping.
I remember when the kids were really little,
We didn't have phones yet.
People weren't bringing phones with them everywhere.
But my son had a Game Boy and I made the rule that no electronics could come camping.
No phones,
No nothing.
And for two days,
And I had nothing structured for them.
We like to do like word puzzle books and things like that.
So I would pick those kinds of things up and we would have noodles for them to swim in the lake and their bikes would be with them and stuff like that.
But I was really adamant that I was not going to plan their fun.
They had to figure this out themselves.
And for two days,
They sat around the fire complaining about how bored they were.
And their dad and I would sit there reading our books so happy to just be sitting on our bottoms doing nothing.
We were farming then.
And I'd say,
Well,
You'll find something.
And they're sitting in the middle of the woods beside a lake.
And they have no idea what to do with themselves.
And I just would say,
You'll figure it out.
And then on,
I'll never forget it,
Because on day three,
I was in the tent,
And I was just straightening out the sleeping bags.
And all of a sudden,
I heard them in the woods behind the tent saying,
Okay,
So here's the castle.
And we're going to go over there.
And they're,
Okay,
And they were playing.
And I swear,
My heart just went,
And that was it.
From then on,
They could play again.
The other thing I did is I had one room in our farmhouse.
I went through a time when I actually sold everything that we had that I didn't like anymore.
It's a whole other story.
And so we had it,
We got rid of all this furniture.
And I had this one room that for all intents and purposes was pretty empty.
And it just had this little,
You know,
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4.9 (40)
Recent Reviews
Katie
January 20, 2025
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟So profound and eye opening! I feel like I’ve been searching for a talk like this FOREVER, and here it is. I’m a girl in my 40s who never stopped playing or pretending (I love Star Trek and I like to pretend I live on Starfleet ships and work in Sick Bay and Cetacean Ops), but my back was broken 10 years ago and then I helped my mother in caregiving duties with my grandparents, and life just became all about “what had to be done” and I got too tired to use my imagination anymore. I’m getting it back though, with help like these types of talks. The best feeling I ever had in my entire life was snorkeling in a 10 ft coral reef, diving between two huge brain corals, and I’ll never forget what I said to myself: “This is the most fun I’ve ever had. This is what I want to do with my life.” One week later, I was hit by a car and broke my back. I’m making my way back to that dream, that began with fun 🐬🌊🐋🪸Thank you, Katrina 🙏❤️🫂