Reflect

While play often centers on activity, it is also a way of being. It’s an open approach to daily life that makes space for uncertainty, curiosity, delight. Without the flexibility of a playful mindset, it’s nearly impossible to learn or grow, change or be changed. The play researcher Stuart Brown explains it this way: two people can be throwing a ball, but it’s one’s mindset that makes the activity a playful one or not. The same could be said about how we work, cook dinner, communicate, tend an important relationship, or face a challenge. In his book Play Matters, Miguel Sicart invites us to think expansively about what it means to play. He writes, “Playing is a form of understanding what surrounds us and who we are, and a way of engaging with others. Play is a mode of being human. Like literature, art, song, and dance, like politics and love and math, plays is a way of engaging and expressing our being in the world.”