This room is boobytrapped. {Look for the pink lines.}

Last week it was my makeup spilled in the bathroom, the floor drenched in nail polish, smeared with lipstick, and adorned with eyeshadow and rouge. This week it’s pink string wound around dining room chairs, crisscrossed over the doorway, pulled taut around table legs. The business of artful play is serious. Just ask my son who boobytrapped our living room. (And smeared his body in highly pigmented M.A.Cpowder last weekend.) Today I jumped over knee-high string to get to the computer, and for at least an hour, I was cool with it.

Sometimes being taut can be a good thing – all those ideas strung together with intensity, the better to look more closely, dig deeper, stay focused. (Don’t know about you, but I’m so over being called uptight. The correct phrase is “detail-oriented.” You know you are.)

And then, when you let go of the threads, when you can walk through the room after all the pink crisscrossing lines are pulled down and the string loose, the space after all that tautness feels so wide open. Free.

How do you balance intensity and play?

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Tagged as: art, children, creative thinking, intensity, play