Welcome to Day 19 of 21 days. A series of 21 daily posts to provide inspiration to connect to your source, prompts for journaling and contemplation, as well as a few little surprises along the way. I hope you'll join us. Click
here to read more about 21 days: creative divine.
Recreation: refreshment in body or mind, as after work, by some form of play, amusement, or relaxation; any form of play, amusement, or relaxation used for this purpose, as games, sports, or hobbies.
I love plays on words. The way you can tinker with them. Recreation means something you do in your spare time. Re-creation means something slightly different but encapsulates what recreation is all about. It’s the time to recreate yourself. A little like renaissance or rebirth. To stop, pause, take a break, play, do something new and, in the process, perhaps experience an a-ha moment. Suddenly something that you’ve been labouring over starts to make sense and fall into place.
It’s tempting to work work work. To keep going with something even when you’re exhausted and depleted. The sensible thing would be to stop, go and do something else, go and play for a while. But we don’t and I’m the world’s biggest culprit. I’m driven to finish something and I have to keep going until I’ve done that, even though often this is self-defeating and carrying on working makes the process longer and doesn’t add value.
Play connects us to our childlike qualities, those of imagination, possibility and fun. Children know instinctively how to go with the flow, how to get into the zone. They want to do the things they love to do.
What matters now is an ebook published by Seth Godin last year. It's a series of single page entries by a whole range of guest writers. I like it because you can dip in and just read a page, be inspired, check out the author's website and learn something new along the way.
One of the entries is written by
Joichi Ito and is titled
Neoteny. A new word. Meaning the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. The piece challenges us to focus less on work, the serious, the constant striving to produce and more on play and how it can guide us away from rigid frameworks and dogma.
Another post is about
Adventure. Written by
Robyn Waters who suggests fabulous things to pursue in the name of adventure:
Blaze a new trail. Dare to discover. Have some fun! Pursue a road less traveled. Quest for truth. Take a risk. Unleash your curiosity.
Adventure requires childlike qualities to experience the awe of the new, the excitement of discovery.
Derek Sivers writes about
Passion and in a few brief paragraphs lays out some important thoughts about what we might believe about passion and purpose:
If you think you haven't found your passion yet, you're probably expecting it to be overwhelming.
Instead, just notice what excites you and what scares you on a small moment-to-moment level.
If you find yourself glued to Photoshop, playing around for hours, dive in deeper. Maybe that's your new calling.
The message very clearly is to do what excites you. In other words, what brings you joy. What connects you to that part of yourself that links you to creative divine.
Gumption is not a word I hear every day. I think there was a cleaning product called Gumption once!
Initiative; resourcefulness; courage; spunk; guts.
J C Hutchins is the author of
Gumption. He talks about how we settle. For less than what we really want. How we accept things when we should pursue something different. How we paint ourselves into corners. And how we've forgotten goals we wanted to achieve way back when.
Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that insists you're over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is the notion of settling. Get hungry - hyena hungry. Get fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.
Flap 'em. It's the only way you'll be able to fly.
Children can fly. They flap their arms and they're flying. As a child I had an imaginary horse. Somehow I got him to school every day in my Dad's car. I tethered him up in the playground on the railings by a pale blue door. At playtime a friend and I would ride our horses around the playground. At night we took them home again with us. I think mine slept in my bedroom.
Imagination is not dissimilar to visualisation. It's imagining how we would like our life to look. It's creating a picture in our heads of what we want so that the universe can go away and work on it for us, helping us to manifest what we want in our lives.
Play and imagination go together. Play engages a part of the brain that triggers our creative energy. You can't play if you're wondering how you look. Play is about having fun, being a little bit mischievous, taking a vacation from work and doing something that is far removed from being serious.
John Wayne:
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.
Be inspired: Some ideas to
bring our your inner child by Mirri Rocks.
Consider a retreat. I've signed up for Jennifer Louden's
2010 Virtual Retreat this month. Some time to step away from the work and spend some time resting and re-creating.
Read: Inspiration Sandwich by
SARK. Lovely colourful, luscious books. Anything by SARK encourages our childlike qualities and for us to play. SARK has lots of inspiration on her
website too.
Do: Look for opportunities to watch children playing. Think back to when you were a child and the activities that you loved. Recapture the feeling. I vividly remember a ball game played in my street with friends and parents. The light was fading but we didn't want to stop. What sort of things do you love to do and never really want to stop?
Robert Frost:
Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.