When we are children, many of us take play very seriously. We can play for hours, with children we knew, those we didn’t, some we just met. I know today many children (and adults) play online with people all over the world, video games that offer worlds of play and adventure.

We often think of play as some kind of departure from our life, a break, a respite, an alternative world. We might think that play is a break from work or a break from responsibility and monotony. But I’d like to offer you another view of play, that has been more compelling to me this month: play as the entirety of our life, rightfully understood, even in the throes of routine and responsibility.

How can our day to day life be understood as play? I think it begins with humility…realizing that our view of life is always too partial to be taken too seriously. The only way we can take our worries and stresses seriously, devoid of any playfulness, is if we are certain that we rightfully understand our worries and stresses. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this is never the case. We never fully understand our problems, worries, and concerns. We can never understand the whole picture. We cannot see or know all that is our life, no matter how much we think we do.

When we allow for a sliver of doubt to creep in to our daily routine, we will see that there is always a mystery there – something in our day to day routine that is beyond our ability to fully quantify. When we discover this basic thing – our problems cannot be exactly as we think, there is always something more at work – we find another space to live in. In fact we find multiple spaces to live in, different ways to live out our routines, different ways to hold our nagging, ongoing problems and responsibilities.

Once we see there are endless alternatives to the ways we can carry our burdens, play emerges as a very good choice. Why take ourselves so seriously, if we are not even completely certain we understand what is going on? Humor arises when we face this limit. Play comes out of loosening our grip on ideas that are exposed for what they are: only ideas. It is our choice to list one thing as work, one thing as daily responsibility, another as play. In truth, we can merge these realities any time we choose.

I remember growing up, my brother and I would play a game to see who could rake pine cones in our backyard the fastest. It was a game, and it was fun, and it was our responsibility to our household: all at once.

I know many of us are not able to take a break from our responsibilities: rearing children, working, caring for loved ones. And it’s a guarantee we will have moments of stress and overwhelm, we all do. But what if when we face those moments of stress, instead of cementing them in our minds and seeking some kind of escape, we take a deep breath and remind ourselves there is mystery that abides in our circumstances. We are not exhausting all that our reality has in store for us. What if we could take up the most serious of tasks with an attitude of play, which is born out of humility, allowing ourselves to loosen up the ways we’ve convinced ourselves that things need to be?

I think that play and playfulness is the pinnacle of human achievement. It is in us as babies, as children, it is part of our intrinsic nature. It’s a gift that never goes away – as long as we remember that the way we think things are only one of many possibilities.

I hope you find some time to play this summer – not as a departure from your daily life, but as your daily life. May your routines be imbued with an attitude of play – there is certainly much more that is possible than any idea we have about what our life is like, any idea we have about what is required of us.