Playing in the field of our imagination is a survival skill for grownups

To play is the most age-defying act I know. This year I am granting myself a month or more of Big Magic sabbaticals where creativity reigns over everything else. Come join me!

As a child, I loved making up stories more than anything else. This, the most essential part of me, has never changed. For years, sometimes decades, this ability to play in the field of my imagination went underground, buried by adult concerns and anxieties, all the building and producing and succeeding. But it never completely vanished.

“Let’s play pretend!” my younger sister would say, and we’d rope my younger brother into our game. In my nine-year-old imagination—expansive enough to spark the excitement of my three-year-old sister and sometimes reluctant seven-year-old brother—we’d sequester ourselves in the garage. Especially on rainy days, I had a captive audience. I’d hand out various bits of costume and accessories. A feather boa for my sister, a gold cardboard crown for my brother, a white cape for myself. My sister was happy to be declared a princess or duchess, my brother a king or duke, and me, the fairy godmother, waving a wand, and walking them through the Rules of this World I had created. It felt marvelous to me, a kind of magic I was spinning out of thin air. My siblings got bored before I did, leaving me to play all the parts and finish out the story.

Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash

I had no shortage of stories in my head. At summer fundraising carnivals we would hold in our suburban Long Island backyard, I was the fortune teller. My long hair held back in one of my mother’s scarves, my wrists jangling with bracelets, I ran my fingers over the crystal ball and told the boy sitting across from me that he would grow up to ride bucking broncos on a ranch in Oklahoma. If he looked pleased, I would embellish, predicting he’d win the national competition and meet the president of the United States who would give him a medal. With each of these “fortunes,” I granted a child his or her wish—a wish they might not even have known they desired.

My siblings got to have their fortunes told most often. We’re in our dark blue station wagon, lying flat on the rough wooden floor in the back of the car, as my father drives through the night. The darkness out the back window is scattered with stars. The towers of the Throgs Neck Bridge loom into view; we don’t know when they’ll appear, that’s the thrill and the fear of it. We gasp as if the tower could grow arms and reach in and grab us. To calm them and myself, I start to tell their fortunes. My brother smiles when I predict his riches and sports cars, my sister squeezes my hand when I tell her about the big mansion by the ocean, the jewels and fur coats and fancy parties, the private jet. We had a middle-class childhood. We never took trips on airplanes, our clothes were purchased at J.C Penney’s, my father drove the old station wagon. We didn’t have riches but we were happy and lucky enough. Still, with the help of my imagination, I could make us soar as high as those towers.

Granting myself permission to play

What I’m discovering in my 60s is that my desire to play has a wildness and urgency that I haven’t experienced since I was ten years old. I want to play hooky from boring adult work and go and play in the field of my imagination. Lie in the grass and see what animal shapes the clouds make. Swim in the ocean until my arms are tired and my fingers are wrinkled. Dance along the shoreline because who cares who’s watching? Stand in awe as a sea turtle makes her way up the beach to lay her eggs, an extraordinary sight I witnessed recently while walking on my Florida Gulf Coast beach, watching the turtle dig a hole with great big sweeps of her hind flippers.

Midlife women want to quit life—at least for awhile

I am listening to that desire to play. That brings me to my quest to take a sabbatical and why I’ve decided to grant myself this most precious of “fortunes” and to call it a Big Magic Month, inspired by

Elizabeth Gilbert

’s book Big Magic: Creative Living Without Fear. With

Anne Boyd

and her Audacious Women, Creative Lives community, we’ll be reading and discussing this book in July, which could not come at a better time for me.

I am also looking forward to the Artist’s Dates that are part of that bible to creative living, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which I’ll be re-reading with the Changing The Channel with Kirsten Powers community also starting this month. Artist Dates are “once-weekly, festive, solo expeditions to explore something that interests you,” Cameron writes; a built-in sabbatical once a week.

The idea of a sabbatical seems to be taking hold of the imaginations of women at midlife and later. Maybe they’re not as audacious as Anne Boyd, who goes all in to “quit my life” (check out her story and all the women who want a piece of that). But they’re still yearning to get off the hamster wheel, to ditch the same-same of a routine, a life, a job, a career, a relationship, that leaves them feeling like they’ve lost their way.

This week I attended a workshop with

Emma Gannon

who writes The Hyphen by Emma Gannon. She recently published two slim little volumes called A Year of Nothing published by the small press The Pound Project. It documents Emma’s journey and lessons through a year in which severe burnout forced her into an unexpected sabbatical. She writes:

“My usual routine was discarded, I was forced to look at what life had become: the things I value, the things that matter, the things that make up a life, the small things: the texture of the green leaves on my houseplants, the soft texture of my blankets, the smell of incense…I was forced to reckon with what my life was going to look like without any of the usual cultural comfort blankets and how to deal with the wide open space in front of me. This book is both a reflection and a thank you letter to my year of nothing which turned out to be everything.”

Emma acknowledged in the workshop how most of us, whether involuntarily due to illness, or voluntarily, cannot take a full year of off to “do nothing.” Yet she says it is possible for most people to carve out small moments in every day to allow ourselves to “do nothing.” There might also be natural times during the year that lend themselves to time off—the slower summer months of July or August, for example, or December, where much of the working world closes up early.

That got me thinking. Could I at last grant myself a sabbatical? I’ve always longed for a period of time—a few weeks, a month, longer if possible—devoted entirely to the pursuit of my creative writing, to whatever project I was working on, or to allow myself the space and time to dream up something new—to perform that magic of an idea in my head becoming words on a page. I am privileged enough financially to make it work. With grown-up, independent children and recently divorced, I have no one I need to support but myself. There is no one from whom I need to ask permission. So why has it been so hard for me to grant myself this dearly held wish?

I’m not alone in grappling with this question. In “The life sabbatical: is doing absolutely nothing the secret of happiness?,” writer Anita Chaudhuri, who interviews Emma Gannon, writes: “Am I alone in feeling a surge of envy reading Gannon’s litany of aimlessness?” Talking to a range of experts, Chaudhuri learns that some people find that taking time out, even just a day, prompts a surge in productivity. And yet, she finds that particularly for women, emotional rest is often the one that is most overlooked. Despite some resistance, Chaudhuri gives herself an aimless day and discovers:

“For once, I’ve slept soundly all night and have had an unusually vivid dream that has provided the answer to a problem I’ve been grappling with for some time. That morning, I have an idea for a new project. As I go about my day in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood, I realise something I’m sure wise sages have always known: doing nothing much can be surprisingly productive.”

I’ve already started laying the groundwork for my Big Magic Month (or two). As I’ve described here, I am intentionally engaged in a Life Design project for the second half of 2024—a second half in which creativity is a core value.

A mid-year pause: What 2024 has taught me so far

I am also using the reframe, tools and practices for taking a Big Leap through the work of Gay Hendricks, described here, in which we take the steps to move out of a safe Zone of Competence or Zone of Excellence to live fully from our Zone of Genius.

Knowing you're ready for the next big leap

In a recent session with my coach

Deb Blum

who writes the newsletter Sacred Second Half, she challenged me in two ways: First, to reflect on how far I’ve come in creating the life I desire as a writer. Two years ago (and many years before that) I was putting my novel writing last, after paid business writing and household chores and responsibilities towards others in my life. In late 2022, after my divorce, it was like a switch got turned on. I hadn’t made such a courageous, difficult decision not to pursue my heart’s desire. I wrote fiction first thing, every morning, before anything else and I finished a novel that is now trying its luck with literary agents. This month the field of my imagination is crowded with new characters for my fourth novel. I am taking myself and my imagination, pen and notebook, to the beach, swimming in the ocean, talking to these characters, watching scenes from their lives unfold and hurrying back to my chair to write it all down. I am playing. And that play comes first.

This newsletter has also become a source of joy and creativity. Even as I write about the hard things—divorce, my mother’s dementia, the grief over her death—I am engaged in the kind of storytelling I have long wanted to do, and finding readers who want to hear those stories.

Second, Deb suggested I reflect on what might be holding me back from devoting myself even more fully to creative living. This could be the ways in which as children we learned that doing nothing was considered selfish or lazy or irresponsible. “Stop daydreaming and go do your homework!” is a refrain many of us heard from well-meaning parents. We learned to judge others for these behaviors, what Carl Jung called shadows, “the thing a person has no wish to be.” Embracing my shadows is a way to access greater self-compassion, as I wrote here. I now understand that one aspect of “selfish” is setting boundaries to protect my creative time and that in resting, I am not “lazy” but letting ideas find their way to me.

Letting the Big Magic slip through

And ideas do need a little magic to find their way to you, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic: “Ideas are disembodied, energetic life forms. The only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.”

She describes how ideas will vy for your attention, and “mostly you will not notice. This is likely because you’re so consumed by your own dreams, anxieties, distractions, insecurities, and duties that you aren’t receptive to inspiration…But sometimes—rarely, but magnificently—there comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something…and the magic can can slip through.”

I will be letting the magic slip through, a little each day. And then at some point this year, I’ll take myself off somewhere to do a little bit of nothing and a whole lot of play.

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Thank you to

Amanda B. Hinton

who writes The Editing Spectrum for challenging me to frame this essay around her prompt, “Write an essay about the thing you loved the most as a child,” from her excellent article “A Quest For Readers, Part I.” Amanda discovered the best way to find her audience was to embrace “a profound sense of permission to play. To do the thing I love to do more than anything else—to grab a captive audience in my hands and tell a story.”

LET’S CHAT!

Have you ever taken a sabbatical and if so, what was the part about it that surprised you the most? And if you haven’t, and desire to, what do you think has stood in the way of that? Is there something you’ve read in this essay that inspires you to move past whatever blocks you?

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THIS WEEK’S SONG: As a woman whose happy place is by the sea, love this one!

I leave my sorries and my worries by the sea
All my past lives and my darkest lies you and me