Happy Halloween, everyone!
Today, on the most playful of holidays, I’m thrilled to share with you a recent conversation I had with designer (and play expert) Cas Holman about her new book, Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity, co-authored with Lydia Denworth.
Cas is the founder and chief designer of the toy company Heroes Will Rise and a former professor of Industrial Design at RISD. She travels the globe speaking about playful learning, the design process, and the value of play in all aspects of life, and she works with companies such as Nike, LEGO Foundation, Disney Imagineering, and art museums around the world. Some of her designs include toys like Rigamajig and Geemo, as well as play experiences at the High Line in NYC and the Liberty Science Center, and you may have seen her and her work featured on the Netflix show Abstract, in an episode called (appropriately enough) The Art of Play.
Put this together and longtime readers of this newsletter will not be surprised at all to find out that when Cas and her team reached out to me a couple months ago to ask if I’d check out an early copy of Playful, I enthusiastically agreed. I loved it so much that, in addition to contributing a blurb, I immediately asked if Cas might be interested in having a conversation for my How to Feel Alive podcast about her book and—more specifically—why she thinks play is essential for grown-ups, and how we can have more of it.
Here is that conversation!
Play is how we learn to be human, how we learn who we are, how we learn to fail, communicate, love, fight, rebel, desire, build, survive. At its best, play is life-affirming, soul-sustaining, and mind-expanding. A life devoid of play is detrimental to our psychological, emotional, and physical health.
—Cas Holman and Lydia Denworth, Playful
My Halloween Takeaways:
I think it’s a perfect conversation to listen to today in particular, given that it’s Halloween. But for those of you who don’t have time to do so, here are three of the things that I’m personally carrying with me as I get ready for tonight.
1. Free Play
When she talks about the importance of being playful, Cas is referring to what’s known as free play: a set of behaviors that are “freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated.” Translation: it’s when you do stuff for fun, without any predefined structure, and purely because you want to do it (not because someone is telling you to). This is how kids naturally play and learn — but it’s something that is very unfamiliar to most adults, in part because things like organized sports and grades and performance reviews and, let’s be honest, parenting have chased it out of us. (Think about it: when’s the last time that you did something purely for fun?)
It’s making me wonder how much more I’d enjoy tonight if I changed my own attitude. Right now, I’m approaching it with a little bit of dread and a fair amount of self-judgment: I “have” to take my kid trick-or-treating and if I don’t “make it fun” for her (not exactly sure why she’d need extra help from me on that front given that this is her once-a-year opportunity to accumulate pounds of free candy) then I have somehow “failed.”
What if instead I took Cas up on her three pieces of advice on how to make life more playful — namely:
2. Embrace possibility, release judgment, and reframe success
Embracing possibility means noticing the opportunities for playfulness that exist around us all the time. As she puts it, “The way you take your kids to school can be playful. The way you fold your laundry can be playful. The way you conduct a meeting can be playful.” It’s really just about our attitudes. And I’m willing to bet that if I come at trick-or-treating with a playful, “let’s go with the flow and see what happens” attitude instead of thinking “this has to be perfect or I have failed as a parent,” it’s going to be more fun for all of us. In other words, it’ll be better if I adopt the second part of Cas’s advice, which is to . . .
Release judgment. Releasing judgment is often the biggest obstacle for adults because, well, we’re perfectionistic control freaks. But why are we so hard on ourselves? As Cas writes, “Who cares if you’re not great, or even good, at something if you enjoy the experience?”
I’m trying to embrace that attitude for myself more often in general, but it’s particularly applicable tonight: Like many people, I have a vision of what a “good” parent (or, more specifically, mother) does with her kid to celebrate Halloween. For example: make a handmade costume. Bake cookies with ghosts on them. Coat your banisters and picture frames in fake spiderwebs. Do something with pumpkin seeds. Then, if I/we don’t do these things (I have not), we feel that we have failed. But what if we stopped doing that, and instead tried to . . .
Reframe success. Is “success” defined as making yourself (and, likely, your child) miserable by forcing them to learn how to pipe icing onto cookies under the guise of “making memories together”? Or could “success” be redefined as having a relaxed, fun, silly evening with your kid? This Halloween, I’m choosing to go for the latter. (As a side note, this means that sometime within the next five hours, I’m going to have long, black sparkly press-on nails applied to my fingers by a 10-year-old—wish me luck!)
We need to play, and we need to connect. We need play in order TO connect.
—Cas Holman and Lydia Denworth, Playful
Play Connects Us
The last thing I’m taking with me tonight from Cas’s book is that play connects us — and Halloween is a perfect night to witness this in action.
There is, of course, the playfulness we experience with kids when we help them dress up in costumes. But on Halloween, I’m routinely struck by how playfulness connects adults. In my neighborhood in Philadelphia, adults of all ages—regardless of whether they have kids—come out of their homes and sit on their stoops. Sure, ostensibly they’re out there to give out candy and compliment people on their costumes, but there’s something much deeper and more important going on: the building of community. People laugh with strangers. Neighbors who rarely see each other chat and share food and drinks. Streets that are usually quiet burst with life. With Halloween as the backdrop (and the excuse), adults come out and play.
“We don’t need to learn to play. We need to unlearn how not to play.”
—Cas Holman and Lydia Denworth
To me, that’s the most beautiful and important aspect of play: its ability to erase differences and bring people together.
It’s something we need more than ever. That’s why tonight, I encourage you to go out of your home—even if you don’t have kids—and actively look for evidence of this happening. Notice the friendly greetings, the smiles between strangers, the silly decorations, the playful conversations, the glimmers of connection and community. And then ask yourself: what might happen if we were able to hold onto this spirit beyond Halloween?
Because here’s the thing: we can.
To scrolling less, living more, and (re)learning how to play —
MORE ABOUT CAS:
Learn about Cas’s inventions, Rigamajig and Geemo
Watch Cas’s episode of Abstract: The Art of Play on Netflix!
Follow Cas on Instagram: @casholman
Join her on LinkedIn
PS: I have a new book coming out on Dec 30, co-authored with Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt, that’s written specifically for 9-12 year-olds. It’s called The Amazing Generation, and its goal is to convince kids and tweens to decide for themselves not to allow their lives to be dominated by screens. It’s available for preorder now—and I’d love your help spreading the word!
