Remembering Play
During our retreat last week, we have been thinking a lot about bringing our business values to life in different ways. One newly embraced value is play. We had noticed that over the years of being business owners as well as creatives, we lost quite a bit of it along the way. Most of the time, we felt like things we made needed to have a purpose that served our business, or our clients, other than just creating something for the fun of it or because we had an idea and felt like making things.
As a freelance creative director, prior to starting Fernweh Studio, I worked for very intense periods of time on pitches, launches, or other projects with a lot of pressure and deadlines attached, and then in between, I took time off to play, to just be, and to recover. Once the first wave of recovering was done, ideas usually popped into my head freely and easily. I saw things that inspired me or woke up with a clear vision of this or that idea and simply started creating. This flow state everyone is praising like it is the holy grail of creativity was like my local coffee shop, I popped in whenever I felt like it. Easy. Fun. Light.
As an entrepreneur, responsible for a family, a mortgage, and other entrepreneurs with big dreams and even bigger VCs breathing down their necks, creativity and flow needs a little more coaxing and coercing most days. I still have clear visions of the visual expression of the projects I am working on, that part never went away. But the buoyancy did. Everything got so serious over the years. Play, even when scheduled as a block on my calendar, usually fell short. The blocks got pushed or ignored week after week for other oh-so-important things, or due to the blank pages being simply too menacing to handle. And after a while, I deleted them from my calendar altogether. We got busy with work that had deadlines.
So now, we are on a mission to reconnect with Play. To allow creativity to flow again, without purpose and punchline. To find the buoyancy. We want Making to feel light again, and joyful. We promised our creativity to take the pressure off and gave ourselves permission to make things that couldn’t fail because there were no expectations attached to them, to begin with. Experimentation encouraged. Failure welcome.
This retreat we have been on was part of the process. Thinking about fun things we want to make, (or sad things too), without considering the how and the to what end. We are leaving Oahu now with excitement and anticipation to start making things again. It felt so freeing to just think about work/play without having to do anything for a week.
And we ended our trip with a weekend with the kids in the city, going to the movies and doing all the things we can’t do on Kauai. And an enlightening conversation with our 9-year-old, Stella, who we asked about her thoughts on Play.
She does not sugarcoat things, I guess she got that from me… so she told us point blank we are terrible at play, me especially, but I am German, so I figured as much. She also immediately pronounced herself as the Play expert we have been looking for and offered her assistance. She said: Adults can’t learn how to play but they can remember it. So, from now on, we have daily creativity lessons with her, as she also said that Creativity and play are kinda the same things.
May we all remember how to play a little more in our work – or lives in general. May we all be a little less German. And may we all have children around who kindly help to remind us when we get lost in the busyness of it all.
Much love,
Lisa & Tim
