How much do you get to play?
“Creativity isn’t a place we go or something we do; it is a way of life. It is who we are meant to be. We are creators.”  – Jacob Nordby
Life can get heavy and serious pretty quickly. There’s no time to play. We must get the work done first. Take care of our responsibilities. When we flick on the news we tell ourselves that play is a luxury. Inappropriate when so many serious things are happening around us.
But what we feel much of the heaviness and seriousness, BECAUSE we have left our spirit of play on the sidelines of life? And what if inviting more play into our daily rhythms, is actually a way to change the world from the inside out?

Playfulness encourages the unique essence of a person to grow and flourish. It opens the door. And allows you to hold the serious assumptions and expectations of the world around you with a lightness of step and a playfulness in perspective.
This is at the heart of gentle rebellion.Where we play with the ordinary, expected, and assumed right way to do things. And ask instead, ‘what if I was to do what I shouldn’t?’
Playfulness
We open up the door to deep relationships and connections with other people. When we play together, we transform together. We grow.
You’ve experienced it. A time of deep connection with someone or a group of people. Laughing together, creating together, playing games, letting your imaginations run wild, joking, and enjoying the power of being.
This is the foundation of the deep and serious stuff. A life of depth and a life of play are one and the same. They are not mutually exclusive.
What better example to look to than a comedian. Those brave souls in our culture who stand on stage and make us laugh. They understand that play and deep seriousness come together. They know that the best way to get into and explore the serious stuff and the big questions in life, is through play. Playfulness with ideas, with boundaries, with assumptions, and with the status quo.
When The Guard is Down
It’s through play that the best art is created. Music. Scientific discovery. Breakthroughs happen in those moments when the guard is down, when the clock is off, and the expectations are left at the door. We hear stories like that all the time.
You might have similar stories. It’s why we might have an epiphany that solves the big work problem when playing with the kids before they go to bed. This, after weeks of meetings where we’ve been trying and failing to come up with creative solutions. When we stop trying to think, our unconscious minds connect dots. And by giving ourselves over to play, we can experience magical creative revelations and epiphanies about the right way forwards.
What is Blocking Your Play?
Jacob Nordby says in Blessed are the Weird, that “if we don’t feel a sense of purpose, it is because we are having a life experience of someone else’s creations.” Play is not consumption. It’s not being entertained or performed to. It’s not the work hard, play hard, approach of working during the week so you can just drink yourself into oblivion at the weekend. Play is about giving yourself to imagination, creation, and dreaming. And this is increasingly hard to do in the modern world, where we can be spoon fed ‘content’, ‘entertainment’, and information, to keep us from ever truly playing.
There are other factors that turn us against our playful spirit:
Messages Growing Up
We get chipped away at over time by people who have lost their ability to play. “Be realistic”, “choose a more sensible option”, “don’t stand out”, “don’t get above your station”,