Making time for play

I am doing The Artist’s Way for a second time, this time with a group of people, and more for my photography practice than for my writing. Now that I’ve gone through it once, I’m a little more prepared for the weeks ahead and my artist dates. For those unfamiliar, an artist date is a weekly 2h block of time you intentionally set aside for play and exploration by yourself. It should be something outside your normal routine and a way to fill your creative well. I made a little jar of artist date ideas to pull from for time slots that aren’t tied to a specific day (like a free museum day). While I’ve been doing more jigsaw puzzles recently, I know I’ve neglected my inner artist child, and I haven’t been as receptive to moments of synchronicity. 

This time around, I’m observing what reading and tasks give me the most joy, resistance, or other extreme emotion. Am I resisting out of fear, a creative block, or both? Do I need to excavate some deep history in my memory that I locked away? The trouble with the latter is that my memory is terrible, and how would I even know what I’ve locked away?? 

Dawson’s Creek is my latest binge-watch. Before now, I’ve never seen an episode and always thought it was fluffy teen drama. Instead, I’ve been surprised by the topics it has touched on—in 1998, I was too young and not allowed to watch it—but covering things like infidelity, divorce, interracial couples, alcoholism, some better covered than others; it was 1998, after all. Currently, I’m in a mental health medication storyline, and I know for sure that that was ahead of its time. I love teen drama shows, but the only one I really watched as a teen was Gilmore Girls, which was so incredibly wholesome compared to The OC, 90210, One Tree Hill, Buffy—all shows I watched later as an adult.

At the end of an episode, when I heard the rhythmic lyrics “Ooh, I want you, I don't know if I need you, but / Ooh, I'd die to find out,” I had this instant transportation to reading the CD jacket with its lyrics, but I couldn’t remember the song title or the band name. It was Savage Garden—who I’ve completely forgotten about, but was actually one of my favorite bands at that time—I had memorized the lyrics to almost all the songs on both albums. How could I have forgotten “Truly, Madly, Deeply”? And Spotify, why do you insist on playing the same three Coldplay songs despite me deliberately not seeking the band out, but not play me important songs like this one?

How many more moments like this can I unlock with music, shows, and play?

My brother gifted me a mini orchid Lego set. I know that the Botanicals collection is squarely aimed at nostalgic millennial plant people with spending power. But in the making of them, I remember what Lego sets used to be like. A lot of it was designed for boys, and the “girls” sets were often not regular Lego-sized but larger variations that resembled dolls. Now, I marvel at the ingenuity of the Lego set designers, combining pieces in ways more creative than just putting a brick on top of another. And I’ll soon end up with an orchid I can’t kill (orchids are on my banned buy list).

When was the last time you did a childhood hobby for play’s sake—by yourself and not with a kid—away from feeling like you needed to be more productive with your time? I feel like we’ve optimized our lives to oblivion and forgotten that free time could be exactly that: free and freeing.

For fun, I found a very long, 80-hour playlist of songs featured in Dawson’s Creek.