a playful spirit & self-parenting
This is my dog, Blue, jumping with her whole body and her whole heart to catch a pinecone a friend was tossing for her while we were all camping together. 😆❤
I’m drinking a very yummy drink (decaf coffee with a Splenda and some amazing vanilla almond milk!*), and just a little sunlight is coming in through my window and landing on my shoulders.
I’ve been thinking about rest and play and fun! Happy topics! I’ve been noticing myself needing more of all of them, especially creating space and developing a Playful Spirit.
Have you ever known a Playful Spirit to be consumed with stress or worry? No, me neither. A terrific antidote to so much! Playfulness just drives the bad stuff out. If we can cultivate our own playful spirits within ourselves and stay connected to them, it helps keep joy, wonder, and hope alive and keeps our focus centered.
This is kind of the furthest area from my expertise 😅😜 but definitely something I’m happy to take note of and practice.
Where is the delight? (in the vanilla almond coffee, sunshine, journaling, mixing up my ruts and routines a little, making my home a cozy haven, freeing up space to do things just because…)
How can I have more fun? How can I follow playfulness? Who around me is doing this really well, so I can copycat them??
What do I feel like doing? Where’s the novelty and anything new calling to me? (open mic, paint-by-numbers! ✨💓)
What am I willing to let go of to keep room for this spacious Playful Spirit entrance? (several things, and it varies by day, depending on what I want and need right then, as well as what I’m truly obligated to/responsible for — which is often less of the tedium than we take upon ourselves as necessary! — but I’m liking the freedom to be flexible with it and skip some things I would normally put in my calendar, have a night here and there just to be home, say no to making another plan with people sometimes, skip my morning workout every now and then for extra sleep and a different sort of morning, etc…)
The thing about living with ourselves (a fun and great show, by the way! Ooooo I forget about this one! Yay! That’s a fun, spontaneous, just because thing I’ll do today, I’ll start rewatching Living With Yourself!), and parenting ourselves as adults, is that self-care must be very responsive to be truly effective. It’s easy to make a list, set some rules, and then push Go and expect ourselves to do these things diligently, with no recourse… yet, if you’re anything like me, then you look around frustrated one day, wondering why you haven’t been able to stick with your “simple” morning routine or daily habit goals; and maybe your checklists are far too involved and complicated, or maybe you’re just forgetting: “We are not machines. We are ancient animals navigating modern times. Slow it downnnn.”
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have any goals or hold ourselves to any level of discipline and follow through — because that’s part of parenting yourself/self-care, too — but it means the ancient animal within us has needs, and our job is to be in tune with noticing them and meeting them accordingly. Like ocean waves, they ebb and flow continually, and we are never exactly the same moment by moment, day by day, season by season. So it follows, our self-care practices, habits, mental hygiene tools, and ways we meet our desires will not be the same all the time either. And that’s okay.
Right now, I need more fun and play. Lightness, space, joy, just because. What do you need??
*Beverage Side Note: when I worked at Starbucks, one of my fellow baristas told me I ordered coffee like an old lady. 😂 Decaf, artificial sweetener, no diary… It cracked me up. I do also sometimes drink things that have lots of sugar, and I consume plenty of dairy, but my regular drink is more like the above. And basically never caffeine! My body has an intolerance for whatever reason, and it just makes me feel terrible.
