Edel Coffey: It's time to stop worrying what others think and embrace play as adults
Pic: iStock
I was reading about a club called the 40+ Double Dutch Club recently in . It’s an American club started by a group of women over 40 that involves getting together to do the things they enjoyed in childhood, notably Double Dutch skipping, but also hula-hooping and playground games from their school days.
The club was started seven years ago by a woman named Pamela Robinson, from Chicago, who was going through a difficult time. Her marriage of 20 years was breaking up, she was suffering with depression and her three children were growing up and becoming less dependent on her.
When she found herself partaking in a game of Double Dutch skipping at a neighbour’s house she enjoyed herself so much that she texted a friend and invited her on what can only be described as a play date.
Her friend realised it was something that Robinson needed to help her through her difficult time and so she obliged and soon they had a group of five women from their local area committed to getting together to play schoolyard games. The group of five women has now grown to a nationwide Facebook group with over 10,000 active members that meet once a year for a giant national play date.
We usually think of play as something that we leave behind us in childhood but any creative type will tell you that play is an essential part of the process. As a writer, I regularly hear the directive, just play, which is a way of saying, don’t worry about the outcome or the finished product, just enjoy the process, enjoy being in the moment, in the game, and follow your instincts. Which is essentially what mindfulness is.
I was discussing this with a friend recently. We both work in very different industries but we both recognised that we like our work most when it involves a sense of play.
I don’t think the urge to play ever leaves us as adults but somehow we are embarrassed by it. And yet there are groups of women (and men obviously) engaging with their childhood hobbies in groups of like-minded people all over the world. We just have to stop worrying about what people will think of us if we join a hula-hooping group or a roller-skating group.
I’d recommend taking a look at the videos and photos of the 40+ Double Dutch Club which show middle-aged women dancing, singing, hula-hooping and skipping with speed and intensity, and generally getting to move their bodies in ways that are fun and empowering.
Physical play is a reminder to ourselves that our bodies are made to move. So much of body movement for women over a certain age feels punishing, we put ourselves through gruelling fitness programmes and classes to make ourselves look a certain way when we could be enjoying ourselves jumping rope with friends.
I was not surprised that Robinson came to skipping at a difficult time in her life and no surprise either that that difficult time coincided with middle age. It’s a time in women’s lives where things become particularly pressurised — family, relationships, careers, growing children, ailing elderly parents … the idea of play seems frivolous. But for something so frivolous, play can make an enormous difference to our adult lives.
And ironically, when we don’t have time for play, that’s usually when we need it most. I wasn’t a big jigsaw fan as a kid but since having children myself I’ve often gotten sucked into their unfinished jigsaws late at night. “I’ll just do a few pieces,” I say to myself as I’m closing up the house for the night. Forty minutes later I’ll look up, my racing mind will be completely clear and I’ll feel energised and relaxed. That is what play does for us as adults.
The older I get, the more I realise there is so much wisdom in our childhood behaviours and surely that is why we always return to the things we loved doing in childhood later in life. Things like colouring or painting or gymnastics or roller-skating or making jigsaws or whatever it was that brought you joy as a child, often holds the answer for what will bring us joy in adulthood.
I was so inspired by the 40+ Double Dutch Club, its success and its origins. The fact that Robinson was able to identify skipping as a mindful exercise that offered some reprieve from her circumstances and the fact that she had good enough friends to support her in setting up a skipping gang was impressive.
It surely took some bravery to approach her friend and essentially ask, do you want to play skipping with me? But sometimes it takes just one brave kid in the playground to ask another child, “do you want to play”, to get the game going.
