Is it time for your second childhood? Maybe it is and you have failed to notice. You've been too busy doing the things American adults do best: work, worry--and wonder why.

A vital part of human nature is your spirit of play. You came into the world with your share. More than likely you used it from the beginning. A game of peekaboo with an infant shows how early it is in place. Just watch the reaction. How eager and responsive the child is to engage in playfulness.

Unfortunately, its all too common today to associate playing with childhood, not with adult life. Remember hearing things like this from well meaning teachers and parents when you were young? Act your age. "Stop playing and get to work. When are you going to grow up? But burn this thought into your consciousness: In the growing process playfulness is not meant to be left behind. It is to come along with you, keeping heart and spirit young regardless of your age.

An episode in one Marvin comic strip illustrates two ways to view play: One from the outside in and the other from the inside out. In this strip; the family was at the beach. Marvins father, looking at his son on the sand, said to himself, Marvin is playing.

Marvin, shovel and bucket in hand sitting near a newly dug hole and a pile of sand, had his own thought. He said to himself, Im a pirate digging for buried treasure. Play when viewed from the outside in is an activity, but when viewed from the inside out, it is a way of life with at least two important features. First, Marvin is serious about what he is doing. To him it is not something frivolous or without purpose. There is intense concentration in this game of imagination.

The second feature is illustrated in childrens popular game of dress up. They begin first with the clothing. Then they try on this and then that. As they do they begin to imagine themselves in various settings. In the course of the game they may go to work, travel, go out to dinner, go to a fancy ball. The play may move from one thing to another. But none of these imagined ventures were a precondition for the playing. These came into the imagination with the act of playing.

In other words, in true play the satisfactions come in the playing itself and not from realizing or achieving some specific goal.

Play generates a vitality that you cannot find in any other activity. With playfulness comes enthusiasm, expectancy, spontaneity, imagination, creativity, adventure, experimentation, discovery. The very attributes one needs to enhance well being and sustain morale

Desmond Morris, in The Human Zoo, interpreted play activities this way: One of childhood's most precious qualities is the urge to seek and find and test, to invent, to discover...The child asks new questions; the adult answers old ones; the childlike adult find answers to the new questions. The child is inventive; the adult is productive; the childlike adult is inventively productive."

Are you in need of play? It doesnt have to remain lost or out of reach. Look to the ways of your own youth, and let it live in you once more. Youll never be sorry. Rediscover your playfulness. Make laughter as common for you as it is for children on the playgrounds at school.