Children “try on” different ways of being in the world through unstructured play. When they’re allowed to just let their imaginations roam they experiment with seeing what it would be like to be different kinds of people.
Unfortunately, today children spend far more of their time in “directed activities.” As a result, children are measurably less creative now. “Directed activities” include everything where children are engaged in things with rules and adults who are making decisions.
I was thinking about how this applies to adults as well as children. We should all try on different lives occasionally. We spend a lot of our adult lives in “directed activities,” trying to live by the rules others set down. Are we killing our creativity too? Maybe we all need more unstructured play time.
I think that’s part of what we do when we go to a B and B. We immerse ourselves in that, we try it on, we think how it would be to live in that environment. We enjoy a little unstructured play, we experiment.
Soon I’ll have a chance to try on a different way of being in the world. I’m sure it will be interesting, and probably enlightening. Of course, details will follow here, as soon as they are some!
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