Day 2 : What, Not How

Welcome to Day 2 everyone!

My heart is so full of joy from seeing everyone participating yesterday. Take a moment to feel proud for YOU for taking the first step in deepening your relationship with your most playful self. How do you feel today? Did your play from yesterday feel surprising, frustrating, exciting, wonderful? Something else entirely? Check out that mental landscape of yours and see how you're doing! What are you looking forward to today?

In my opinion, the best way to Play is self-directed. Therefore - every day for the next 30 days, you will receive a WHAT in the form of a play prompt. These prompts are themes that span across all of the play types. This gives us a focus, a WHAT, unites our efforts, but let's us all do our own thing in our own way - playfully!

Have you heard about Inktober? #Inktober2020 is happening right now and might be well suited for any artist-creators out there. Originally started by Jake Parker, Inktober is a 30 day (traditionally pen and ink) drawing challenge that has morphed into many spinoff prompt lists and mediums and even.... play challenges - yup!

The reason why I think Inktober is so successful, is because it gives you a WHAT but does not dictate your HOW. This frees everyone up to be as playful and imaginative as possible. Playing is the same. The best play sometimes sprouts from the least expected spaces, sparked by something seemingly unrelated or random.

This brings me to today's play prompt!

Now keeping in mind the properties of play that we learned yesterday - that playing should be FUN and freely chosen - if the play suggestions for your type don't get you going, do your own thing! Our goal is to be playing every day. As long as you are doing that, you're crushin' it. The prompts are simply a jumping off point for interpreting an otherwise kinda daunting feeling abstract theme, and are a way to challenge and stretch how we think play can and should happen. Take what you need, leave what you don't, and be playfully open to discovering something unexpected. If you have an idea for how you want to play in a day that is independent of the theme, GO FOR IT! Look at you, thinkin' outside the box.

Check out the panels below for some more questions to get you playing around todays prompt: LAUGH, geared to each personality!

Laughter on a Train shows us just how contagious laughing can be. It spans across all play personalities, and reminds us of our common human-ness. I'm so excited to hear about how you all choose to interpret this play prompt for Day 2 and I hope it brings you some joyful laughter for your Friday!

I will be highlighting various methods of playing throughout the day tomorrow in my Instagram stories over @eastonsmith on IG. I love seeing and hearing how everyone is playing, so please totally tag me and use the hashtag #playyourwaychallenge !

Happy Playing!