A lot of my time at work looks like sitting, listening, reading, and typing. I found that when I left work for the day, continuing to engage in these types of tasks left me feeling tired and drained. Then one day, I heard it said:
“If you work with your mind, rest with your hands. If you work with your hands, rest with your mind.”
What a thought???
"As adults, we often forget the importance of play, but it's essential to make room for it—play recharges our spirit, fuels creativity, and keeps us grounded in the present."
Knowing I needed more play in my life and wanting to experiment with resting with my hands, I started signing up for fun little classes. First, it started with a four-week improv workshop, then a pickleball clinic, salsa dancing lessons, pottery wheel throwing, and even starting sourdough. Along the way, I found rest in bringing my body into the experience, lots of laughter, and a few unexpected lessons.
These silly little activities ended up showing me so much about the lives we actually live.
Improv
The first rule of improv is “yes, and.” Essentially, when you’re working with a partner—in my case, a stranger I’d never met before—with no script, your goal is to accept what they say and build on it. Improv scenes tend to fall apart when you shut down what the other person just said.
An example of "yes, and":
Person A: "Oh no, I forgot to bring my wallet!"
Person B: "That's okay, I have a hundred-dollar bill here. I was just about to buy a boat."
Person A: "A boat? That’s amazing! I’ve always wanted to sail to the Bahamas. Maybe we can use your hundred bucks to get a yacht!"
An example of shutting down:
Person A: "Oh no, I forgot to bring my wallet!"
Person B: "Well, that’s your problem. I don’t have any cash, so I can’t help."
The first example takes an unfortunate moment and turns it into a whimsical adventure! The second example... well, doesn’t that sound a lot like the everyday lives we live?
Part of this idea of “yes, and” is that you cannot go into a scene knowing where it’s going or desiring a specific ending. As improv unfolds in the moment, your partner doesn’t know the inner wonderful idea you have. Forcing your desired outcome causes confusion and misses out on all the fun, whimsical adventures that come with accepting what is as what is.
What if you lived life that way? You didn’t try to force the ending you had in mind. You accepted what is as what is, and added on to it, embracing this moment for how it has showed up.
Imagine the difference you would feel if you allowed fluidity to move you from space to space, rather than rigidity trying to force a desired result.
Pickleball
“Pickleball is played in pairs. Does anyone know why?” the instructor asked the six people who came to have fun, not necessarily a history lesson. No one answered… So, I chimed in, “To fall in love, of course!” Everyone chuckled while the instructor looked at me strangely. “Well, not exactly. No one has ever given that answer, but I suppose that could be a result of playing in pairs.”
Sometimes, something comes about for a specific reason, and you ultimately find a different benefit from it. Think about Silly Putty. The original goal was to create a synthetic rubber to help with a lack of resources during World War II. Six years later, it became a household name in the toy section. Not what anyone thought it might become.
There will be things in your life that you desire, and in searching for them, you may not find exactly what you expected. But what if you looked outside of the box? What if something was out there to meet your need, even if it wasn’t its original purpose?
Salsa Dancing
“Now ladies, I don’t want to hear any of this ‘No one’s asking me to dance because I’m fat. I’m not pretty enough. I just stand here and everyone passes me by.’ If you’re not dancing, it’s not because of what anyone thinks about you. It’s because you’re not asking! In salsa dancing, the lady asks the man. If you get caught up in your mind, believing all that nonsense, you’re never going to dance. The other women have already asked, and the guys have already filled their dance cards. If you’re not dancing, the only person to blame is you. So get out there, ladies, and start asking to dance.”
Nicole had a way of being blunt with her language. This long soapbox moment was followed by a very long pause. The women were on one side of the room, the men on the other. She ended with, “So get out there, ladies, and start asking to dance.” Thinking the silence after this statement was an instruction to go ask a man to dance, I proudly and confidently kicked my little foot out and strutted to the one person I knew on the other side of the room. When I tell you the entire room of 100+ people started laughing and hooting and hollering... it was the ENTIRE room. Nicole yelled over her microphone, “GET BACK TO YOUR SPOT! I didn’t tell anyone to move. But ladies, take notes, because you know who’s going to be dancing all night long? She is.”
I went from full confidence to complete embarrassment. I’m sure my red face looked like a Northern vacationer in Florida for spring break, without ever using sunscreen.
But here’s the lesson: What if the whole lot of nothing in your life has nothing to say about how others perceive you and everything to say about you taking the first step?
What if all the spiraling thoughts were silenced for just one minute, and with all the confidence you could muster, you strutted toward creating an invitation for yourself?
If you invited someone to lunch instead of questioning why you were never invited. If you showed up to a networking event, submitted the job application, instead of doubting if you’re qualified because you only meet 80% of the requirements.
How much fuller might your life be if you let other people set their own boundaries instead of setting them for them?
Pottery Wheel Throwing
It takes a lot more force to shape something when you start off-center. The first step in creating a pottery piece is throwing a blob of clay down on your wheel. And the hardest part is throwing this blob as close to the center as possible.
Let me tell you, my weakness was figuring out what the heck center was.
However, even when my blob was off-center, I could still create different pieces. It just took a whole lot more force to keep my blob on the wheel and shape it the way I wanted it to be.
At the end of it all, I still walked away with mugs and jars galore that hold warm drinks, pretty flowers, and are now home to my sugar.
I get it. We want to wait to start until we feel centered and at ease. It’s ideal, really, to “have it all together” before starting something new. But what if you started off-center? What if you realized that you have the strength to do it anyway and accepted that you can do it, even if imperfectly?
Imagine how much more you could do and become if you accepted yourself off-center and allowed her to do the dang thing, guiding her along the way, course-correcting as you went instead of putting her in timeout until she was “good enough” to start.
Sourdough
Fun fact: Every month I host a dinner party for strangers. There are about 200 people signed up for dinner parties, and each month, they say whether they will attend. Once we have all the yesses, people get put into smaller groups, and I get sent a list of mostly people I’ve never met. A quick text later, and they have my address and show up at 6 p.m. on the third Saturday of the month. Crazy, I know, but I haven’t been murdered yet!
And here’s the thing about dinner parties: The Pinterest girl in me comes out. I get to scroll and pick the most ideal menu for the evening, cooking things I would never make for myself on a regular Tuesday night.
So one month, it had been cold and snowy, and rainy outside, which made a chili night sound so lovely! But it’s a dinner party, so it needs an element of “extra.” Three weeks out, I decided everyone needed a homemade sourdough bread bowl to eat their chili out of. A few blog posts and Facebook groups later, I was on the way to creating my own starter. Now here’s the thing about sourdough: It’s a science, and three weeks is not enough time to make a starter, learn a recipe, and produce the perfect loaf if you’re a total beginner.
So, I had two loaves that were okay but not right. If I posted the crumb for a read, I would have gotten a lot of pointers. The bread was gummy and chewy, not light and fluffy like all the photos showed. But I spent HOURS making this dang bread, so I still served it with lots of prefaces and warnings.
Four slices in, one of the guys asked, “Do you sell this? Because if you don’t, you should!”
There may be a perceived “right way” to do things, and that right way may not be the way you do things. It would be easy to go into hiding, continuing to rehearse, learn, and grow until you could emerge replicating all the photos and videos of how everyone else did it. But what if your way is actually loved by someone? What if the version you’ve created is even better than the “right way” to the people and world around you?
As I reflect on these quirky experiences, I’m reminded that the process of creating, learning, and simply showing up is often more powerful than the final product. In each of these activities—whether it was embracing the chaos of improv, taking the leap in salsa dancing, navigating the imperfections of pottery, or offering a less-than-perfect loaf of sourdough—what I found was more than just play. I found a deeper connection to myself and others, a reminder that life doesn’t always need to be perfect to be meaningful.
Sometimes, we’re all just trying to find our center, keep the momentum going, and trust that the messy, imperfect moments are exactly where we’re meant to be. So, if you’re feeling like you’ve missed the mark or are struggling to find your rhythm, know that you’re not alone. And, maybe, just maybe, the next time you feel off-center or unsure, it’s the perfect moment to take a step forward, embrace the imperfection, and let the journey unfold.