The Weight of Play

I watched my nephew dragging a heavy box of books across the living room floor this morning. He wasn’t moving them to be helpful; he was pretending the box was a ship and the carpet was a stormy sea. He was sweating, his face flushed with the effort of the haul, yet he was laughing harder than I have in weeks. It struck me then how we spend so much of our adult lives trying to separate work from joy, as if they are two different rooms we have to walk between. But looking at him, I realized that for a child, the two are often the same thing. They don’t see the burden; they only see the adventure they are building. We lose that somewhere along the way, don’t we? We start counting the weight of what we carry instead of the stories we are creating with it. When did we decide that effort had to be joyless?

Emteaz Ahmed has captured this exact spirit in the image titled Impatient of Infancy. It is a beautiful reminder that even in the middle of a long day, there is room for a smile. What is the last thing you did that felt like work, but made you laugh?