TO PLAY

Before we get down to the year’s posts of advice & encouragement, I wanted to share a magical thing that happened to me at Christmas.
Christmas gets a little paler as we grow up, & mine was thin last season (no visitors, no journeys, you get the idea).

A friend surprised me with a ‘digital advent calendar‘ with a Christmas-in-Paris theme by Jacquie Lawson & Co., & I was by parts delighted & curious. I had subscribed to Jacquie’s digital cards about 20 years ago, always marveling at the Flash programming (no longer used) that made dogs dance and butterflies picnic, & I don’t know where I fell off, but I sort of (sorry, Jacquie) forgot all about her & her work. Well!

Enter this gift of Parisian beauty, with all sorts of activities for every day until the Big One. (It’s still installed on my devices so I can marvel at its complex frivolity. . . & play Solitaire & MahJong.) The web designer in me puzzled over its programming  – certainly not Flash, mais non! but HTML5 & even at that, very complex. I had to admire the detail to every scene & activity.

Every Advent day there was an event in ‘town’, a present to open in the living room of a lovely Paris pied-à-terre, a tree to decorate, puzzles to play, books on Paris landmarks & architecture, recettes de Noel (recipes, real ones), music tracks of the Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris – the choir school for Notre-Dame Cathedral  recorded for just this app . . . & a puppy & kitten! I was a child again.

And then on Christmas Day I opened a (physical) gift from my daughter of a set of watercolors & paper. Truly, I was being guided to play. Not paint a masterpiece, nor something for sale, but to simply dip into my imagination & let my heart guide me. And so I have, little bits at a time. Samantha Dion Baker has been a catalyst to bring out my shy creativity in this.

I tell this story because I sense I am not the only adult in the room. We are grown up, responsible, & our work is our identity & to some degree, our lifeline. We are tempted to create, but we stopper it down with “will it sell?”, “what will be its significance?”, “what will I do with it when it’s finished?”. It’s so, so difficult not to turn a creative expression into a commercial endeavor, where it is then consumed by demand & fulfillment. . . & then it sort of withers inside, doesn’t it? It’s not play anymore.

My hope for us both is that we can make room for play, for things that don’t matter quite so much. I can think of some artists I’ve met whom I’d like to ask this same question: How to separate inner child’s play from the outer world?

Stay tuned. Between sharing creative stories & bringing encouragement to your own business branding, sharing photographs & photo process (& recipes!), I hope to insert a little story of play.