Just Playing

"Close your eyes. Pretend you're ten years old again. Just playin'. You're just playing. I want to play football."
-Coach Eric Taylor, Friday Night Lights

I think living with intention and purpose is one of the hardest things, ever, despite what all of the self-help authors and super successful people in this world may think and tell us. Living this way, filled with intention and purpose, requires a kind of resolve that not much of us adults know because we are trying so hard to just keep it all together, to just keep the game of life moving forward. 

When I was sick, I had a purpose and an intention. My job was to get well. And while I, still, will always have medical issues - when half your body doesn’t work like it's supposed to, that's just the way life is - I hope and plan to live a life full of a purpose and intention. A purpose and intention that exists other than just achieving physical wellness. I want my heart and spirit to heal as much as my body heals. I want my soul to dance. And, more importantly, I want to serve my fellow seekers of the light.

I don’t really know how to get to this place of a purpose filled life, but I am willing to keep trying. We all want to anesthetize pain with what feels so good. Although, I believe, the grown up version of what feels good, isn’t always the catalyst to purpose. 

But, what I do know, though, when i was ten, I played house and I drew fake roads, with chalk, on my parents’ driveway so I could run pretend errands and rush my fake kids to pretend soccer practice. I was totally enveloped in my chalk drawing purpose. I know I danced with joy at the McGing Irish Dancers' studio. I know I played school in my basement. I know I was super into clothes and fashion and my mom always says, when she was nine months pregnant with my sister, I insisted she tuck her shirt in, despite her huge belly. I still love to play house and cook and clean and run errands and dance and teach and pick out the perfect clothes and mother everyone I know. Just like, when I was ten years old. 

Mary Oliver writes, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

We knew our plan. We knew when we were young. We knew this plan when we made forts out of blankets and played house in the woods and pretended sticks were forks. We just played. We didn’t have an agenda; we didn’t require perfection. We didn’t judge our play. We just played.

As hard as it is to live from this place, especially, in a world so filled with hurt and isolation and illness and heartbreak and bills to be paid and babies to be fed and who is right and who isn’t - we must still be brave enough to insist we live from this sacred and innocent place. We must find that child in our own lives so that we may see that innocent child in others' lives. We all just need to learn to play and believe and trust and most of all, just love. Just love the child. Loving, ultimately, is the way we live from the truest of all intention.

This plan, to just play and live from our ten-year-old-selves, may not be the answer, I have no idea. But, for all of the millions of dollars spent on therapy, wars, protection, politics, and perfection, self-help books, lectures, and all avenues to feel well again, it’s worth a try. Please, this holiday season, if you are grateful for nothing else, be grateful for the ten-year-old who lives inside of you. For she knows the answer because she is just playin'. "