“The benefits of play don’t disappear as soon as you become an adult. Even if we engage our curiosity in different ways as we grow up, a lot of learning and exploration still comes from analogous activities: things we do for the sheer fun of it.
“… Play is often the exploration of the unfamiliar. After all, if you knew what the result would be, it likely wouldn’t be considered play. When we play we take chances, we experiment, and we try new combinations just to see what happens. We do all of this in the pursuit of fun because it is the novelty that brings us pleasure and makes play rewarding.”
“Learning Through Play“, Farnham Street
Do you remember how to draw a square with a dot in the centre without lifting up your pencil?* Drawing random, overlapping lines on a piece of paper and then colouring in the shapes with the rule that there couldn’t be any adjacent the same colour, which sometimes necessitated adding in another line?
What’s inhibiting your experimentation (aka play), the following of impulse and the “what if I” moments? Concern about the cost of materials, wasting time, lack of results, others laughing at you or complaining or insisting you should do something more ‘worthwhile’? Figure out what it is, and give yourself permission to not worry about it for a bit. Being “productive” is the anthithesis of play, and always being “productive” is ultimately counter-productive.
*The ‘trick’ is to fold over the corner of the sheet of paper into the centre of the square.