The Value of Playing With Friends

Linda and I just returned from spending the afternoon with our friends, Gary Powell http://www.garypowell.com/ and Amy Person http://persontherapy.com/ . We gathered at Gary's home with some other friends to celebrate Gary's birthday (I won't say which birthday it is, but Gary, one of the most talented music composers and producers on the planet, is looking and feeling great at his age!). We knew going into this that today's agenda included "playing games". Linda and I are not much into games, but this turned out to be a blast. We played games that Gary made up over the years. Just one example is Wokball. This consisted of bouncing ping pong balls over two obstacles and into an empty metal wok so that the balls stay in the wok. While at first it sounded a bit silly, it ended up being a lot of fun, which brings me to the point of this post ... don't forget to have fun the old-fashioned way, by playing with friends. 

It doesn't matter how old you are, you should break from the routine of what you usually do with friends and just play. When I interview people in my work at LifeStories Alive http://www.lifestoriesalive.com/ , I make it a point to ask questions about what they did for fun as kids with their friends. The answers in every case include the person's face lighting up as they describe the fun things they did. So why should those memories, those experiences that make our faces light up, be reserved for our younger years? Why not make new joyous memories now?

As we said our good-byes we all agreed that we should do this more often. Willa Cather once wrote, "Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

So I say to our friends Gary and Amy, "Thanks for the memories. Let's make more of them more often". And to those of you reading this, there are friends of yours just waiting for you to make new memories with. Just be sure to have some old-fashioned fun making them!