“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” – Albert Einstein

Yesterday my sister-in-law took my daughter for the day and my son was in daycare, I had an entire day to myself. This is so rare, especially since COVID came and we have all been packed into the house on most days. I’ve had a few hours here and there but a whole day?? Of course I needed to work, the house was a mess and I had a to-do list as long as my arm so I was far from bored but the real question was, did I know what refills my cup?

Brené Brown has been doing this podcast series on The Gifts of Imperfection as it’s the 10 year anniversary of that book. And there is a particular guidepost in it “Cultivating Play and Rest – letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.” It was a reference that Brené made in a podcast to this guidepost and the work of Dr. Stuart Brown, psychiatrist, clinical researcher and founder of the National Institute for Play, that got me interested to read the Gifts of Imperfection in the first place. That to be whole-hearted, that is to say, fully awake and involved in life, we need to play.

My first thought when hearing about cultivating play was that I am a mother of young children, I should be all about play. My second thought was I have no idea what play is for me anymore. When I got my first night off from parenting when my daughter was about two years-old, I went out to drink wine with a friend. It was fine but I ended up feeling like I wasted that precious time. The second time I had an overnight break from parenting was when my daughter was three years-old and I went on a meditation retreat. It was so lovely to eat organic food, do yoga, meditate and cut out pictures for my vision journal. It really worked to refill my cup but isn’t very practical to do very often. The same goes for hiking which is my all-time go-to for refilling my cup but often takes too much time driving to do on these rare days off.

Here’s what I’m slowly realizing about cultivating play and rest for me. I know I’m still learning because I’m trying to be the most productive at rest. 🙂 But with that said, rest for me always involves some combination of reading, writing and exercise. Being quiet including turning off extraneous noise like the tv in the background is important. I never clean my house when my kids are gone unless it’s part of tackling a project that is fun for me. I try to reach out to at least one person that is key to my health and sanity. And when I’m very lucky, I go to a rarely visited neighborhood and find a place to eat lunch with a book.

Last night when my kids were returned to me, I listened to their reports from the day and we galivanted around the neighborhood and talked with neighbors, I felt like a new (renewed?) person. Someone who had a refilled cup to share with everyone else.