When Did You Stop Playing?
“Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: ‘How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?’” - Naval
When I try something new, I’m usually bad at it.
That’s just how it goes.
I don’t like to be bad at things, and I bet you don’t either. So instead we have this internal dialogue and tell ourselves it’s too late to try something new.
It’s too late to become an actress. It’s too late to learn how to code. It’s too late to start a business.
In cases like these, the real obstacle is our ego. It stands in the way of us doing “the thing”, whatever that dream may be. As Julia Cameron points out in her creative masterpiece The Artist’s Way, “too late” is just a frame of mind. Not a reality.
“Question: do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play the piano?
Answer: The same age you will be if you don’t.”
As Michelle Rial brilliantly depicts in this illustration (which I’ve adapted below), the only time it’s actually too late to try something new is when we’re dead:
Nonetheless, it’s scary to ignore that little voice in our heads – the voice built to guard us against humiliation, uncertainty, and rejection. But we have more to gain than we have to lose by outgrowing this layer of protection. If we’re willing to let go of ego, we can finally start to understand ourselves more deeply through wonder and play.
Wonder
I think of wonder and play as related, but different.
Wonder is a prerequisite for play. Getting to the place where we’re open to wonder can be harder than it seems. It requires us to question how we’ve approached life thus far.
Even though this seems obvious, it’s difficult to internalize. In See No Stranger, a manifesto-memoir about revolutionary love, Valerie Kaur defines wonder as a curiosity-based orientation to life.
“When we choose to wonder about people we don’t know...[including ourselves], when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of those we see as part of us. We prepare ourselves to love beyond what evolution requires.”
Wonder asks us to unlearn and rewire in order to operate from a place of genuine curiosity. It asks us to put down our defenses to uncertainty and imperfection.
I struggle with this a lot.
I’m competitive and over-confident. I’d rather have answers than questions. While these traits may have served me at some point in life, they’re not serving me anymore.
But since I’ve approached life through this state of mind for so long, it’s tough to set my ego aside. I’ve been practicing wonder in the way Kaur describes by remaining curious about myself. This shows up in my life in the form of questions mostly:
What would it feel like to write every day?
What’s one thing I can do to be creative today?
What’s something I used to love doing that I don’t do anymore?
On the days that I take a stab at answering these questions, I reintroduce play into my life.
Play
Play is an innate part of being human, but can be challenging to discern.
Rather than assigning it a specific definition, psychologists and researchers have agreed on a few properties that constitute play. Dr. Stuart Brown outlines these attributes in his book Play:
Notice how the list doesn’t include traits like progress, perfection, or even competence? We’re allowed to be bad at things when we play. How liberating is that?
We’re taught that time spent on things we’re bad at is unproductive. And that being unproductive is the worst sin of all. But as Amos Tversky reminds us, “you waste years by not being able to waste hours.” Many of us waste years in careers or relationships because we’re so unwilling to face the uncertainty that accompanies wonder and play.
Ultimately, play is all about framing.
We have to rewire our brains to interpret our unstructured, directionless hours as the very thing that will give us the direction we're seeking. It has everything to do with mindset, and very little to do with an actual activity.
Play opens our minds to parts of ourselves that we might have forgotten or left behind on the path to societal acceptance. Those versions of ourselves may be the pieces in our lives that feel missing. Off. Not-us.
What Kind of Runner are You?
Dr. Brown presents an analogy to help us understand how play might morph based on how we think.
He explains, there are four types of runners: exercisers, competitors, enthusiasts, and socializers. The first two runners are not playing, while the latter two are:
We can either be at play while running or not. Even though the actual activity — running — doesn’t change, our mindset dictates what we get out of the activity.
This is just running. But it’s a great example of how society teaches us how to value ourselves and others. There is space in our life to be each type of running archetype, but we internalize that some are better than others.
It’s always tied to output and productivity.
This threatens play and is dangerous. Subconsciously, we’re trained to think our worth is higher when we’re an “exerciser” instead of an “enthusiast”. There are activities that we might have started as “socializers” that we now take on as “competitors”.
Can you think of activities that you once considered “play”, but no longer do? When did you stop playing?
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Wonder and play are natural. We all know how to do both.
But oftentimes our experiences in mainstream culture push us away from prioritizing these things. The older we get, the sillier it feels to be bad at something. We’re trained to think that as adults, we should have our shit together. So we stop playing and our wonder is calloused.
But this is just a story we’ve allowed society to narrate.
In reality, we’re never too old to try something new. Never too old to fail, and try again.
Knowing that, what’s something you’ll try this week?
Play on, Playa
Shiv
Stories by Shiv is part of Wayfinder, a writer collective exploring questions that matter.