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Thursday, March 27, 2008

Play - a quarterly review!

In January I wrote about an alternative to the traditional New Year resolution - http://bilsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/not-new-year-resolution.html and chose Play as my word.

This operates at several levels:
  • related to the goal it means ‘work less and play more’. As I move towards retirement I need to shift away from work as a total pre-occupation. I enjoy what I do and spend ‘leisure time’ reading and researching around my job, but this will be redundant when I retire so I need to start replacing that activity with others.
  • It’s been a busy time at work but I have managed to work less at home, probably because I’m too tired in an evening to do much! I have deliberately spent less time reading/blogging around the day job, which has meant that I’ve managed to contribute to this blog more regularly - and I know I’ve benefitted from that.
  • I spend a lot of time at the PC prevaricating and know that I need to be doing something more positive - I need to play (aka stitch!)
    I have definitely spent more time in my sewing room than ever before and have finally (though not necessarily permanently!) conquered my inability to stitch/play for extended periods of time. I am now regularly losing myself in my work - no artificial cut-offs after 20-30 minutes!
  • when I play (aka stitch), I want to experiment more. I’m taking small steps but doing this on my own seems to mean that there are never any giant leaps or sideways steps going on.
  • Hmmm - not so sure about this, but perhaps this is a hard judgement to make about yourself. What I have done is had a re-think about the definition of play, or more to the point have thought about how children play. And the key here is repetition - the same game, the same characters, the same toys over and over with little variation until something else catches their attention.
    I think I”ve been quite hard on myself, not allowing myself to re-use colour combinations or techniques because I wouldn’t be ‘pushing’ myself. But if I’m really going to play not only do I have to give myself permission to re-use ideas I need to actively encourage myself to do so!

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