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Consider the last time you played, not a sports game or anything on a electronic device/console, just simple playing with no stakes, extremes or rewards beyond the activity itself.

When I was younger it was easy for me to amuse myself with a box of Legos for hours on end with no aim except to ambitiously create for creation’s sake. I made up stories and worlds around the senseless contraptions I constructed that transformed them into heroes, villains, architectural bastions, deadly weapons or sleek technological marvels – simple blocks. I used to look at the age labels on the side of my toy boxes with fear, dreading the day when I would be mandated to let go. No mandate was necessary, at an early age I started drawing and discovered I could toy with seemingly limitless creativity with just a pencil in my hand, liberated to create with unbound rules and parts/pieces and inspirations. How freeing?

Fast-forward twenty years or so and I find myself sitting in my art studio, many times more capable than the boy of my youth and yet feeling like I have forgotten how to play with my creativity as my younger self did, feeling like I must regularly relearn and affirm what came so naturally before. Potential reasons why are obvious enough and can by summed up in the myriad of responsibilities that come with adulthood. All of which, still, make play in art now so crucial because it is one of the few doorways through which I could genuinely be playful apart from the constraints of everything else; it is the one place where I’m fully both an explorer and a director, where I could create for the moment, for the love and challenge of it, not for a tomorrow.

How would you play today if you were to let go of tomorrow? Considering this may at first conjure up thoughts of wild and reckless indulgences as if play reaches its zenith in complete escapism. But playing, particularly in art, is not escaping, it’s seeing, marveling in and engaging the beautiful possibilities in any approached dimension of reality whether it’s a block of stone, lines of code, a sheet of paper, a song, or a Lego set.

I recently got to visit my niece. She’s a little over 2 years old and at the time was enthralled by the purchase of a soap bubble gun. Once we got the thing working she was shooting away streams bubbles. I followed her eyes as they along with her tiny body darted from bubble to bubble, studying her captivated amazement. That’s what art seems to do, give me a window into someone else’s world of play, especially valued when I’m finding it hard to get there myself.