Believe me, I understand this one! As I wrote earlier, I hardly took time to play as a kid. As an adult? Forget it! I didn’t allow myself time to play until all of my work was done and my work was almost never done. Finally, however, as I have gotten older and wiser, I realized that I was making the choice to work instead of play and that I could make a different choice.
Time is a funny thing. Every day, we have the same 24 hours, but some days that doesn’t feel like it’s enough time and some days, it feels like too much. How we use our time and what we define as our priorities is in our control for the most part. What was great about finally realizing that was that it also meant that I could control whether or not I had time for play and whether or not it was a priority. Once I made my own play time a priority, it became easier to find 15 minutes for myself. And, yes, sometimes those play times were stolen moments, like the 15 minutes of coloring I did one night while my daughter was in the tub. I prefer to have my play time when it’s quiet, but that hadn’t happened on that particular day so I took what I could get and still found my time relaxing and better for my blood pressure than checking Facebook.
What I also realized was that when I said to myself “I don’t have the time to play,” what I really meant was “I don’t consider myself enough of a priority in my own life to do something for myself until everyone and everything else is taken care of first.” That was a stunning realization for me. I knew I was not completely self-absorbed, but I also did not think that I was a self-negating door mat either. And really, though I won’t stand for anyone else making me a door mat, I had been doing it to myself for years without realizing it. That was something I could change too.
