Mama Wants a Play Date!

Play. I am ready to play. I want to schedule a play date with a friend. I want to have fun. I don’t want to go on a walk and have a heavy conversation. I don’t want to meet for lunch and talk. I want to play with someone and laugh and get immersed in something that doesn’t really involve my intelligent mind.
I want to play with my creative mind. Yes! My focus, sure. My spirit, absolutely!

Yesterday I admitted to my husband that life has felt heavy lately and he replied, ‘well, yeah, you’ve been a bit consumed with some pretty big social justice issues.’ So true. I didn’t really realize that it had been permeating into the other bits of my life. As the kind of person that tends to over analyze and always wants to be the best/do the right thing I spun into this place that it must be wrong to be so concerned and passionate about something if it is going to create heaviness in my life. If I lose my playfulness and joy then something must be wrong.

Oh my god, my extremism even exhausts me. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. I can gracefully dance through my heavy stuff and back into play mode if I’m aware. I am practicing this beautiful thing called awareness. I became aware of how heavy things have felt recently and noticed that I missed the lightness, missed my happiness. I’ve missed just being with people vs the determination I’ve had to discuss some pretty complicated and systematic issues in an attempt to figure it all out. It was like each moment I wasn’t learning, questioning, having an aha moment was a wasted moment.

I whisper to my own self today, “Just Be. Slow Down. Experience the Joy.”

As I practice this I’ll find more joy in the heavy stuff so there isn’t as much separation between the two.
But not today.
This is what I wrote in my calendar so as I skip through my day I won’t forget:

Slow Down.

Feel Happy.

Play. Laugh.