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Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
I try to see most of the things that I do as play, when I’m in the kitchen, I consider it as playtime, playing with different spices and seasonings to produce a desired flavor. The same can be said for baking, especially for baking, getting your hands all sticky with butter, flour and sugar, it reminds me of playing in the mud or playing with clay and then using all of the special tools to make different shapes and forms, how can one not see that as playtime.
I can’t think of playtime without thinking of my gardens, getting down and dirty in the dirt, finding all the worms and other insects scurrying and burrowing within the dirt, digging out the boulders whenever I want to add a plant, I do live on a mountain and mountains are primarily made of rock, that is playtime. It helps to see gardening as playtime because it does entail a lot of physical work and if you didn’t see it as something fun, it would just be dreary physical labor and how fun would that be?
I discovered this mode of thinking quite a while ago, it actually came from my warped anorexic thinking when it came to exercise; for every physical activity that I had to do no matter how boring, how onerous or however monotonous, I was burning calories and that made everything okay. I decided to think of everything associated with cooking, baking and gardening in both ways, first it’s playtime and fun with the results being worth all of the effort and with every movement incurred by these activities, calories are burned and muscles are used, circulation is accelerated which is good for the veins, arteries and your heart.
Life is all about perception, I know that when you are in the throes of depression or things are really not going well, trying to get yourself back to a happier place seems daunting but it can be done. I speak from experience, I know depression but keeping these little mind “games” in play does help keep the depression at bay. I’m always a work in progress.
laurieanichols 