Why do you learn to play by yourself?

Many times, do you feel that life is boring, with only work or study in your heart and limited time to play? Even if you have time to play, you won't have a good time?

I often feel this way when I first went abroad.

When I was a student, I was probably a good student for a long time. When I come home from school every day, I feel guilty if I don't do my homework.

Later, I worked, even after a tiring day's work. If I don't find time to learn English or read a book to recharge my batteries, it seems that I will be abandoned by the whole world tomorrow.

At that time, there was nothing new to play, except having dinner with friends occasionally, singing K or hiking.

However, after working abroad, I witnessed the completely different lifestyles of people around me, and a question slowly stirred in my heart: How did these crooked nuts live so easily?

After slowly observing, I summed up the mystery: after work, they are good at playing.

How to play?

Let's start with Amanda, a westerner. She is the mother of three young children, the youngest of whom just turned one year old. She works full-time and has no parents to help with the children. She relies on her full-time husband to take care of her family and abroad. The busyness of her work and life can be imagined.

But even so, she and her husband can spare at least half a day for their own entertainment every week on the premise that Sunday is a family activity day.

Every Saturday afternoon, her husband and a group of friends form a community cricket team to play cricket. At this time, she was beside the venue, cheering for him and taking care of the children.

It is Amanda's own leisure time for her husband to take the children to play in the morning.

Sometimes she plays golf, sometimes she walks, and sometimes she rides a bike. Some of these activities are carried out with three or five friends, but if one day a friend can't come, she will enjoy it alone.

Amanda is my hiking partner. Last time I was hiking on the north coast of Sydney, she told me that she was studying the information of surfing training class at the moment, because she planned to start surfing next summer!

Amanda leads a full and relaxed life, because she is good at balancing the relationship between work and life, family and individuals. Her energy and passion often infect friends around her. Friends like to communicate with her and like her confidence and openness.

Carlos is a young backpacker from Italy. I know him because there is some simple gardening work in my backyard that needs help. We found him in an international backpacker hotel with a legal working background.

He is quick to do things, sunny in character and full of energy. He told me that he planned to stay in Sydney for 1 month, work while playing, save some money, meet his girlfriend at the next stop, Cairns Great Barrier Reef, and go diving together.

Carlos has been to more than a dozen countries through this way of work and travel. In Italy, he also has a full-time job as a designer, but every two years he takes a long vacation of one to two months for in-depth travel.

During these trips, he learned photography, surfing, diving, gardening, playing clay sculpture, batik fabrics, and even learned the skills of transplanting rice seedlings when traveling in Vietnam. Even his girlfriend is a French girl he met during his trip.

Experience while playing also brought inexhaustible inspiration to Carlos' design career. After the trip, he was always inspired by generate, and his work became easier.

Amanda and Carlos' work is not easy, but why are their living conditions not tense or even easy?

The answer is: they can play, and they are good at playing with themselves.

Playing with yourself is the basic ability that everyone should have.

Playing with yourself, the test is how to get along with yourself.

Some people say that "play" is a relatively advanced state of life and should be a compulsory course for all people who live independently.

If you are nervous all day, your mind is full of work and study, and you think that playing is a waste of good time. Even if you take time out to play occasionally, how can you have fun?

In recent years abroad, I found that the Chinese community has a common feature, that is, everyone gets together, and the most common topic is house and children: how to buy a house and invest? How to teach children?

This is because we can't play since childhood and have no hobbies. On the road of pursuing happiness in life, it is easy to fall into the whirlpool of chasing fame and fortune, obsessed with material things and even worshipping money.

When people of this character get together, there is nothing to talk about except the only topic "house and children"

People who can play naturally know how to please themselves. Only by making yourself happy can you have more strength and mood to deal with trivial and ordinary things in life.

If you can play, first of all, you should relax. And when you start playing, you are highly focused.

When studying how painters work, psychologist Mihaly noticed a characteristic, that is, painters often forget fatigue, hunger or discomfort when creating, and they will be immersed in it, excited and satisfied.

He called it "flow", which is a feeling of putting his energy into some kind of activity completely, a wonderful state.

The highest level of play is to generate traffic, which shows that you have completely invested in it and brought you a positive and beautiful feeling.

A person who can play with himself must be an interesting person. He can entertain himself, but is he worried about entertaining others?

I chatted with a friend in China on WeChat the other day. She says she is busy now, but she often feels bored and unhappy. She told me half jokingly that the only time she was busy was on the subway, and occasionally there was no signal on her mobile phone, but she didn't know what to do.

Now is the era of mobile phone screen. However, from the perspective of pursuing the pleasure of life, the Internet and mobile phone screens deprive us of sensitivity to subtle changes, and to a great extent deceive our brains, making them think that their hands and eyes are always busy, that is, they are living seriously.

Because it is easy to fill all your fragmentation time in the era of screen-brushing, so that you have no chance to be in a daze, and even make you mistakenly think that I am busy and I will have a good time.

But if your happiness must be given by others, it will be difficult to last and will be deprived sooner or later.

Only by making yourself happy is the happiness you really have. This kind of happiness is persistent, lasting, readily available and independent of others.

When you have played enough, this kind of happiness is contagious enough to attract others to play with you.

Jiang Xun said in Six Lectures on Loneliness: When you are driven by loneliness, when you look for ways to get rid of loneliness, you will be in a very terrible state; Because people who can't get along with themselves are also difficult to get along with others.

Being unable to get along with others will make you feel a great sense of nothingness and make you tell yourself, "I am lonely, I am lonely, and I must break this loneliness." You forget that the action of breaking loneliness quickly is the cause of great loneliness.

Psychological research shows that there is a law of marginal decline in material satisfaction, that is, the more you get, the less you feel happy. Only by pursuing spiritually can we base ourselves on the present, broaden our horizons, make life full of fun, and the happiness in our hearts will radiate around us.

With the ability to play with yourself, you have the ability to get along with others. You can be satisfied when you are alone. When you get along with others, you don't need to cater to others' needs, and you don't care whether others meet your expectations.

In this way, when getting along with friends, the state will be relaxed, natural and sincere, and the effect will be very pleasant.

The law of people getting along with the world is the same as that of flowers. When your body is fragrant and pleasant, it will naturally attract people to stop and even linger.

About how to play with yourself, Wikihow has a very detailed strategy, telling you the corresponding methods in different occasions and places, which can be used as a reference for the instruction manual.

For example, at home, you can try dancing to music, playing marbles, playing solitaire, making handicrafts and so on.

In the outdoor, in addition to regular solo sports, you can also play bouncy balls and shoot arrows. You can even sit in front of the window of a cafe, have a cup of coffee, watch people come and go while drinking coffee, and imagine their living conditions and even their story life according to their clothes. It is also extremely relaxing.

Japanese writer Kenichi Ohmae has a book called "OFF Learning: Only Play Can Be Successful", in which some suggestions are mentioned, which is very practical. You might as well try:

1. Try to make some interesting people and learn from them.

2. Travel for more than 5 days once a year, go where you want to go and enjoy it slowly.

You can set aside some relaxing time for yourself every week.

4. Try different foods regularly.

Don't just read a few fixed types of books, try to read different types of books.

6. Learn a completely different knowledge every 3-4 years, stay curious and discover a bigger world.

In my opinion, we can also try this way: be a child again and learn from the children.

Because children's world is the simplest, besides eating and sleeping, playing is their natural mission: to play with themselves, family and friends.

Among them, if you look carefully, children are actually the best at playing with themselves. They play house by themselves, being parents for a while and babies for a while, and they are too busy to get carried away.

When they ride Lego, they can spend half a day worrying about a small part. They don't feel tired or bored. On the contrary, they had a good time and were pure.

If we can play like children, will we still worry about having fun?

But you may have to ask: how can you be a child if you are no longer a child?

The first step, when you finish reading this article, close WeChat, put down your mobile phone and leave the TV, and let yourself adapt to a completely lonely and silent world first. Close your eyes, meditate for a moment, imagine yourself as a child without distractions, and imagine the beautiful moment that can bring you the most pleasant experience.

The second step is to end the imagination and start action. Do something that can calm your mind, such as reading a book, drawing a picture, cooking a meal, or going out for a walk in the park.

Step three, it doesn't matter whether you are a child or an adult. At this moment, you are you. You are immersed in your own little world and enjoy the charm of being alone. The noise of the world around us is no longer so important.

Or, simply ignore all the above steps and learn the King of Children from The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon: Play chess with yourself.

Imagine a fox friend sitting on the left and a dog friend sitting on the right, cursing his bad chess and bragging about himself. This should be the highest level of playing with yourself.

Only with fun can we live in peace with the world.

Being happy for one person means that everyone is happy.