How much space should we allow for play? 💌

Notes on unclenching my jaw.

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m on a flight from Lisbon back to Barcelona as I write this. As is often the case when I’m in transit, I’m suddenly typing hurriedly into the notes section of my phone.

There’s something about being in the in-between that encourages these droplets of thoughts to form. The rising sun starts to burst through the tiny window as we move through the sky, and my vague ideas start to burst too, moving from my brain through my fingertips. 

The ideas feel real but scattered, and currently so do I. I took yesterday off work to make the most of my trip, and the to-do list I’m returning to is long. I left the unticked boxes behind in Barcelona on Saturday, but the weight of them is starting to return as I think about everything I need to get done before visitors arrive for the weekend.

These aren’t problems; they’re lovely things in my particular design of a life that I’ve very consciously built. But last week was a busy flurry of Just About Keeping Up, and I left for the airport with the kind of hurried restlessness that was very much my default setting in London. 40 new thoughts presented themselves in between zipping up my bag and picking up my keys, completely forgetting by Thought Number 11 that I was indeed meant to be picking up my keys.

The flurry was down to a squeeze of my projects colliding at the same time. I essentially have four different jobs, none of them full time but all of them stimulating, and all of them naturally requiring thought, focus and dedication. 

Four jobs sounds like a certain type of hell to some people, but this creative banquet keeps me engaged and expansive. Freelance life is many things - unstable, uncertain, eight emails to get an invoice processed so you can pay the rent - but boring it ain’t.

But, in carving out these different pieces of my career, for different people and different audiences at different times, every now and then they all collide in a way that pushes the equilibrium out, and things temporarily get overwhelming. 

Last week was one such week. It saw me editing podcasts into the early morning, replying to clients at random hours, running from Spanish lessons to health appointments while I did my best to eat right and make sure my glucose levels didn’t put me into an ambulance, such is the daily quest of someone living with type 1 diabetes.

My body screams. My sleep suffers. I wake up with a headache after clenching my jaw through the night, dreaming of email chains and Instagram captions.

I’m aware that this busyness is a product of my choices, and as someone without dependants, these choices were all mine to make. It’s short-lived but it’s too much, and I don’t enjoy it. I enjoy good mental health and getting eight hours of sleep, mostly.

And that’s never been more clear since I’ve moved to Spain. I take my time here, because everyone takes their time here. There is always time, and that’s really good for someone with a tendency to say yes to just about everything, because just about everything sounds fun. Life in London perpetuated this Just Say Yes-itis to a very unhelpful extent - there was always something to be doing, someone to be seeing, something more to be seeking. I didn’t realise for a long time that I was often saying yes to the wrong things, for the wrong reasons.

Life in Barcelona is very different. It’s been noted on more than one occasion that I walk too fast. ‘Con calma!’ I’ve been told, as I hurriedly move to make space for someone else. Spanish culture really values switching off, being present, and indeed… taking a moment.

I absolutely ADORE it. 

My favourite example of this is that you rarely see Spanish folks carrying takeaway coffee, in the way that is very much a daily staple elsewhere. It’s tantamount to necessity in London if you want to have any chance of functioning by the time you get to your desk, which you must do with a sense of flustered annoyance after you’ve fought your way out of the tube having spent 20 minutes nestled into someone’s armpit at rush hour, as was very much my daily pre-pandemic experience. 

But the bustling city I now call home is much more steady, much less flustered. And no matter what, no matter how little time you have, there’s always time to stop for a coffee. It might be at the bar counter, sipping for a matter of minutes on a bar stool. It might be on the window ledge outside, curiously glancing at a newspaper and lingering over a cigarette. But the ritual, the moment, the time is taken to stop and honour the drink in a vessel that isn’t paper, at a pace that isn’t hurried, with attention that isn’t divided by the fact that you’re simultaneously trying to open an umbrella, leap over a puddle, shout at a careening cyclist and send a voicenote at the same time. 

It’s the sweet taste of presence. 

Ok, coffee interlude complete. Back to the deadlines. The issue I have with this current collision is that I really like my jobs. I don’t really work in serious environments; I get paid to make content and write words and have in depth conversations with people about their lives. I take them all seriously, and there have been some incredibly serious moments within them but my jobs, in their various guises, consist of connecting people to themselves or others through stories. And that is heaven to me.

Since I took my first weekend job in a bakery at the age of 14, I’ve enjoyed working. I loved hospitality, I loved working in a wedding dress shop, I loved watching reams of paper churn out from the factory mill, crisp and warm. I loved teaching children to point their toes and make a diamond shape with their legs as their first ever pair of ballet shoes delicately brushed the floor. 

But for this reason, and particularly now with the type of career I’ve built, work has a tendency to bleed into the rest of my life. There’s always something more I could be playing around with; tweaking, editing, writing, revising over the course of a weekend or an evening. I’m not sure my brain completely differentiates between work and play, because creativity to me is one and the same.

And despite what the productivity experts tell you, I’m not sure that’s completely advantageous.

Ali Abdaal, who does fantastic work to simplify productivity methods, notes in his recent book ‘Feel Good Productivity’: “Psychologists increasingly believe that play holds the key to true productivity, partly because it provides a sense of psychological relief…

…Life is stressful. Play makes it fun. If we can integrate the spirit of play into our lives, we’ll feel better - and do more too.’

Away from the psychologists, we see these messages in various guises, printed on wall art and filling up your Instagram feed:

‘You don’t have, you get to.’ // ‘Fall in love with the work’. // ‘Do what you love, love what you do.’ // ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ // ‘Find what you love, and let it kill you.’ (I come back to this 2013 article frequently).

While I truly think work can - and should - be enjoyable, why do we have to associate play with doing more? Maybe there’s a benefit to keeping the work/play boundary intact, in order to protect play as just that.

The experts seem to agree that play is as essential for adults as it is for children; that it’s an inherent part of human nature. But it doesn’t seem to be validated unless it’s wrapped within the context of being part of the thing that you get paid for, which certainly doesn’t feel playful when I’m sending that eighth email to get an invoice processed so that I can pay the rent. 

Can we not just… play? 

Play helps us to expand. It helps us to experiment safely. It helps us to regulate emotion, it can release oxytocin and dopamine. It helps us to connect. It helps us to experience.

So, my question is, are you playing enough? And beyond that:

Are you playing just to play?

My trip to Lisbon to see friends was booked months ago, and as such I was forced to shut the laptop and to separate myself from my emails and my edits and my to-do list, which I’ll admit I did a little begrudgingly on Saturday morning. But between the point of that first long-awaited hug and the finishing the first glass of wine, I slowly, then rapidly, switched off. I took my eyes away from my phone and took myself outside to do things and see things. We had seafood and strolls and bike rides and beautiful in-depth conversations and I laughed so hard I nearly fell over, such is the easy familiarity I have with these friends - the type of connection I’m yet to quite build in Barcelona. The type of connection I so crave after spending a day with the taps of my keyboard for company.

The weekend was the very essence of play, just to play. And while my alarm pulled me out of my sleep at an ungodly hour this morning in time for my flight, I woke up smiling - jaw free of clenching. 

The reality of returning to the to-do list is looming with increasing force as we journey closer to Barcelona, and closer to my desk. But nothing terrible has happened because I dared to take a three-day weekend. The world is very much still turning, and I can see more of the beauty in it thanks to my three days of play, caught in the glow of the rising sun as I sit in this in-between.

So I hope you’re able to find some play this weekend. And if you can’t, or you think it’s a child’s game, maybe you could take a tip from my Spanish friends and drink a coffee in a vessel that isn’t paper, with attention that isn’t divided, and enjoy the sweet taste of presence. Just for a moment.