Play... it's not just for kids

Last Sunday I went rock climbing and rappelling in Necedah with my brother (Derek) and a group of friends who are summitting Grand Teton with us in July. Derek and I have been climbing for just over 20 years now, but this was the first outdoor rock climbing experience for all the others in the group except one. (And, yes, each of them came home safely!)

If you've never been rock climbing, particularly outside, it's a challenging activity which requires a certain degree of flexibility, balance, and grip, midsection, and total body strength and endurance. Besides those physical requirements, outdoor climbing includes a healthy dose of swatting mosquitoes and brushing away cobwebs while also managing your response to the natural, yet very real fear of heights. Or, rather, the fear of falling from said heights, even though a rope is used as protection from the normal consequences of such a fall.

At the end of the day, you head home dirty, sweaty, a little scraped up, and completely exhausted, both mentally and physically. But it's a total blast, and the views from the top of whatever you're climbing are usually amazing and entirely worth the physiological price of admission!

I tell this story not to suggest that you should try climbing—although I whole-heartedly recommend giving it a try at an indoor gym sometime—but rather to bring up the concept of play.

According to Stuart Brown, M.D., author of Play and someone who has made a career out of researching the subject, play is, by definition, "an absorbing, apparently purposeless (i.e. done for its own sake) activity, that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time [that]... makes you want to do it again."

He also points out that the fun experienced during play is a major factor for maintaining the discipline required to master challenging skills, whether those skills be physical activities, work skills, areas of detailed study, or anything in between. In my own personal experiences and as a coach, I've observed that we also generally learn faster when we're having fun.

Back to Sunday's climbing adventure: While each member of the group experienced varying degrees of difficulty in climbing and success in reaching the top of the climbs, everyone admitted at the end of the day that they'd had fun, learned something about climbing and themselves, and experienced a renewed sense of commitment to their Grand Teton training preparation.

In other words, whether they realized it or not, they were actually playing most of the day (even though it came along with a healthy dose of fear).

Which leads me to the point of today's tip: As we age, we have a tendency to become "stiff". I don't mean that from a muscle or joint perspective, although that's also certainly the case. Rather, our attitudes often grow more rigid and inflexible; we become (more) averse to failure, being wrong, and appearing foolish. But those are the conditions that often occur when we play and are almost requirements for increasing our rate of learning. So when we reduce their occurrence, we also affect the quality of our lives.

As the old adage goes: "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." Dr. Stuart agrees but uses blunter terminology. He actually states, "When we stop playing, we start dying."

Putting it into practice

So the questions of the day then become:

1. How often and in which activities do you play? (Stuart points out that work and play can coexist.)
2. If you play less often than you used to, can you determine why that occurred?
3. What's one way that you could add an element of play to a relatively normal, mundane activity?

If you answer all three questions and implement what you come up with in the third, you'll likely be happier and experience positive improvements in whatever area of life — fitness, nutrition, work, relationships, education, and more — to which you add the element of play.

One final note from Stuart, in case this seems like I'm suggesting the shucking of responsibility or not following a plan to improve:

That sentiment applies quite well to climbing.