Jung made an observation about me this morning. She had been thinking about my post yesterday, “Music and Merriment,” and she noticed a pattern emerging in some of my posts about my past: whenever I lost touch with play and joy, I lost touch with myself. My quest to create more joy and play isn’t only about having fun in life. Play is my engine and joy is my compass. When I didn’t use joy to guide myself in the past, I went way off course and pursued goals which belonged to somebody else. When I created works out of a desire to please others rather than play, I became disconnected from my natural engine and instead relied more-and-more on willpower until eventually my willpower ran out.

Now I look to joy and play as essential to my life. I recognize that joy isn’t something that I merely want, but something that I need in order to stay on course. Likewise, I have embraced play not just as something to add fun to my life (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but as a perpetual engine; the one engine which doesn’t consume energy, but creates it!

When Jung and I began dreaming up Soul Play Family, I had already spent quite a bit of time creating a “vision board” consisting of a couple hundred stickies on a section of wall in our bedroom. Many themes emerged (and continue to emerge) from that board, but two of the earlier ones were connection/community and play. That is how I came to chose “Ambassador of Play” as my title in Soul Play Family. At the time, though, I chose it based on intuition trusting that as our Soul Play Family 365 Experiment progressed, I would understand what it meant to me to be the Ambassador of Play.

Now I’m beginning to understand why I was led to choose that title. For years I’ve struggled with motivating myself and one of my favorite methods was to tell myself, “after you do this, then you can play.” Now I see that is like telling a woodworker, “after you build this using a rock and rusty nails, then I’ll let you make something in your workshop.” That would be foolish. Why hire a woodworker and not allow him or her to do their best by working with the tools they know in the environment they are comfortable in. My workshop, my tools, and my home is in play. Anything I can do, I can do better when I am at play. That is where all my energy and motivation lie, and that is why for me, play must come first.

Play is my habitat; it is where I’m meant to be. Not only that, as you can read throughout my writing, I love to tell people about play. That’s part of my job. I am the Ambassador of Play.