How Do You Make Time to Play Every Day?

I'm on Day 5 of my Have Fun Do Good Daily Practice: Move, Play, Reflect, Connect, and once again the biggest challenge for me is making time to play. It was easy to play over the weekend, but fitting it into the work week is proving challenging.

I know this is very commencement speech-ish, but I looked up the definition of play in the dictionary. The definition I found the most intriguing was:

a : recreational activity; especially : the spontaneous activity of children

which led me to the definition of spontaneous:

1 : proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external constraint

and the etymology of recreation:

from recreare to create anew, restore, refresh

Isn't it interesting that we associate play with children's natural tendency to spend time creating new experiences? Do we play less as we get older because we learn to not follow our natural feelings, and to regard new experiences as risky?

If I ask myself in this moment what I naturally want to do that would restore and refresh me, I can think of lots of things like: bake a new cookie recipe, read one of the new books I got from the library, or go to a yoga class I've always wanted to check out, but I don't have the time.

Are we really only meant to play on the weekend? My question for you is, how do you make time to play every day?

Flickr photo credit: Play with Me!! uploaded by Ryan Carr