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Fooling Around


One of the things I noticed in my research was that wholehearted people tended to fool around a lot. This was how I described their behavior, "fooling around," because I didn't know what this behavior was. It was such a foreign concept to me that I couldn't even name it correctly until I happened to be sitting in the backyard watching my kids jump on the trampoline. All of a sudden, I went: "Holy crap. Those grown-ups in my studies are playing! They are piddling and playing! They are total slackers!"

Then I found some research by Dr. Stuart Brown. He said that play is something you did "that caused you to lose track of time." Which I called work. He called play "time spent without purpose." Which I called an anxiety attack.

Clearly, I had a problem. So I sat down and made a list of nonwork-related things that I love to do where I lost track of time, I lost my sense of self-consciousness, I didn't want them to end, and they didn't serve any purpose except that I enjoyed them. Then I had my husband do the same thing. Then we did it with our two kids, and I made a Venn diagram to understand the data (sorry, I'm a researcher).

Our family-play Venn diagram showed us what kind of play we share in common, and we realized there were only three kinds that we all enjoyed. Because sitting on the floor playing Candy Land? I'm not losing track of time. I've been on the floor for 30 minutes; I could shoot myself. But swimming? Hiking? Going to the movies? All of us enjoy that.

So now, we totally build our family vacations around being outside. Because it's play for all of us. It's battery-charging for all of us. But that doesn't just happen. We draw diagrams. We plan. And then...we goof off.

Doing the Scarecrow


What keeps most of us from dancing—at any age—is usually the desire to be cool, and being cool, even for grown-ups, is a refusal to be vulnerable. Cool starts early. Some of the latest research shows that rather than being an adolescent issue, our kindergartners and first graders are starting to feel anxiety over being cool and belonging. Imagine being 5 years old and deciding that it's not so good to let others see how we feel.

When it comes to dancing, we're afraid that we're bad dancers or that others will laugh at us, so we don't do it enough. About eight years ago, my daughter and I were at Nordstrom. She was in fourth grade, and there were these beautiful, put-together mothers in the shoe department with us. I was in my Jabba the Hutt sweatsuit; I looked horrible. And I was doing the whole shame routine...down to telling myself: "Argh. You're a disaster. You don't belong in this nice store with these fancy, put-together people."

The kids' department started playing a song. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some movement. Then I saw three of the beautiful, put-together mothers and two of the daughters look past me, gasping. When I looked over, it was Ellen. Everyone was looking at Ellen. She had put her shoes down, and she was full-on doing the robot to the music—popping and locking. Without a care in the world. And you could tell these daughters were getting ready to laugh, and the moms were like, "Oh my God, girls, shield your eyes."

At that moment, I had a choice. Previously, shame would have taken over, and I would have looked at Ellen and just said: "Pull yourself together, Ellen. Come on. Jesus. Stop being so...weird." But I just heard this voice, the voice from my research and the voice from what I was trying to change in my own life, and that voice said: "Don't betray her. Be on her side. Be on her side." So I looked over and said, "Awesome robot." And she said, "Hey, Mom. Show me the scarecrow again."

The scarecrow is when you swing your hands like they're not connected to your elbows. I did not want to do the scarecrow in Nordstrom. Inside me there is a seventh grader with sweaty palms who doesn't have anywhere to sit in the cafeteria. But I did it. My daughter and I danced. Maybe I was faking it at little, but actions are far more important than anything we tell children. We have to show them love and self-worth, just as we have to show ourselves love and self-worth. We can't just overlay these ideas on our lives. We have to change the way we live—and, fortunately, there isn't just one way to do it.

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