NormsMilfordBlog

The Best of Jack’s Winning Words 5/13/24 – Originally sent May 13, 2010
“Age merely shows what children we remain.” (Goethe) The Happy Birthday Song entertains both children and the aged and is said to be sung more frequently than any other song. Do you know of someone who’s having a birthday today? Birthdays remind us of the passage of time, but Goethe reminds us that there is still life to live. Carpe diem! 😉  Jack
 
I’ve posted about this here a few times, almost always inspired by some post by the late Pastor Jack Freed. See my post – Learn how to play again or the one on Lighten up and learn how to play. In that second post I used a favorite quote from George Bernard Shaw – “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

The passage from childhood to our adult lives is filled with admonishments to “be serious” or to “stop acting like a child”. We are literally forced to give up our sense of wonder and the fantasies that help children cope so that we can become “grown ups”. But is that a good thing?

Certainly, we need to learn how to focus on the things that are required to live as an adult, but that does not preclude being able to get in touch with our childhood from time to time. Even our “play” can become something else, if we let it. Our games and the sports that we engage in lose their sense of play when they become competitive. Our need to keep score and measure ourselves against others replaces the pure joy of play.

One grows old no matter what; however, one does not have to completely lose their ability to play. Regain your inner childhood by finding things that you enjoy doing just because you are doing them – maybe something as simple as dancing. Then do them just to enjoy them. Don’t keep score. Don’t worry about where you finish or what the record score may be. Just enjoy doing and playing. Play as if no one is watching. Play as if the doing is all that maters. In the end, it is only the playing that really matters. Let your play show what a child you remain.