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One of our very best friends, Jen, recently took us out to a secret locale where she had made a fabulous discovery — a small cave that was the home of a red fox vixen and her kits.  We sat for a long while, watching the kits play.  They attacked leaves, sticks, and each other.  They bit each others’ tails.  They balanced along the edges of cliffs and along the tops of logs.

Naturalists will often observe how play in young animals prepares them for adulthood.  These little foxes were learning skills that would make them effective predators.  They were honing their agility, learning how to bite and shake prey, and becoming more aware of their surroundings.  As humans, we similarly encourage play in our children, as it helps them develop important skills.

But play is much more important than that.  Indeed, it may be one of the most important (and most neglected) skills that we can carry on to adulthood.  From one perspective, you might say that everything we do in life is play — except that we’ve forgotten that we’re playing, so life takes on a feeling of serious weight.  A woman I was recently speaking to via the internet shared an article she had written about parenting, and I was especially taken by her description of doing yoga with her children.  They weren’t exactly cooperating, and she considered what situation might have evolved if she had flowed with the kids’ propensity to play.

Sometimes, as grown-ups, it can feel like play is lost to us.  We might try regaining a sense of play through various exercises, but the quest can be self-defeating, because play is one of those things that has to be done just for its own sake (sound similar to meditation?).  Once we play in order to ‘better our lives’, it isn’t really play any more.

Luckily, we can all regain our sense of play,  and all we have to do is observe our everyday lives.  Just watch.  This is also a ‘passive’ activity, like play or meditation.  If we observe with clarity, examining our every assumption about what is important in life, we’ll begin to see that much of what we take seriously is just people playing (but as stated above, playing while forgetting that they’re playing).  The humor of this situation becomes pretty evident.  And from there, it’s not difficult to see that you are playing as you act out your daily activities.

The key, then, is not to develop a sense of play, but to discover that we’re already playing.

We’re going to keep re-visiting the foxes to watch them grow.  Their romping about is a beautiful reminder of what’s really important in life.  You can see a few more pictures of them at our nature blog, or see our entire day’s adventure at Live the Juicy Life.