Evening the Playing Field

 By Helen Vollmer, President

Remember running through the sprinklers with buddies on a hot summer day?  What about hosing down an older sibling with the garden hose just because you could?  Or, playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids until the moms started yelling our names to come home for supper?  What about toilet papering the house of your first crush? Built any forts lately?

Sure, we all ride our bicycles, hit the jogging trail or go exercise, but that’s not quite the same as real playtime and real fun.  In fact, it’s called the opposite—a “work out.”  Sheesh- what’s the matter with us humans?  What ever happened to playing without a purpose?

In a new book, Play, by medical researcher Dr. Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan, the case is made that playing is not only good for our bodies, it’s critical to learning social, decision-making and leadership skills.  It makes us more flexible and adaptable.  Brown says we need play in our lives in much the same way we need sleep.

I’m a believer!  In a couple of our offices in Texas, we celebrate spring with an old-fashioned egg hunt.  Staffers run rampantly through the halls in search of treasures that sometimes contain treats, sometimes money and sometimes confetti.  It’s a 15 minute madhouse where everyone is grinning like crazy, and whooping and hollering like they were eight years old again.  Precisely the point.  As everyone gathers to see who found the golden egg (stuffed with a $50 bill), and who’s never experienced a cascarone cracked on their head, we all come together in a giggly, goofy mess that lasts the rest of the day.

Wow—playing can make us less stressed, more productive, more creative and more fit?  Sounds like a win-win.  So, go fly a kite, hit a few balls with your kids, find that croquet set hidden in the basement.  Celebrate spring and summer this year by running through a sprinkler.  The cobwebs in your mind might just call recess.