A friend shared an article from the Huffington Post entitled “50 Eye-Opening Questions to Ask Your Grandchildren.” In reading the piece, I realized it could serve as inspiration for this childless 30-year-old. It would be a good exercise for me… for all of us. So here’s to a new series of questions. I’m going to pick my favorites and share over the coming months. May you also be inspired to reflect deeply on your own answers.
Question: What is the silliest thing you’ve ever done?
When I copied the questions into my writing document, I scanned the list, highlighting my favorites and making notes for what I might write for each. Upon first read of this question, my mind laughed with a “not appropriate for The Smile Project blog” responses coming at me from every direction. I was instantly thinking of the stupid or dangerous things I’d done. “How silly of me!”
This was followed by realizing that a child would take silly to simply mean “silly.” Like goofy, funny, comical, silly. Not silly how my mind had interpreted it as stupid or idiotic.
And I can see why I wanted to put some of my worst decisions into the “silly” classification—as if doing so could make those experiences more innocent, more harmless.
If I were to answer this question as a child, my answer would be innocent. The silliest thing I’d ever done? It would be about building such a reputation in early elementary school that multiple classmates would sign my yearbook with praise for the “funny dinosaur noises I make at lunch.”
That’s what silly should be.
So perhaps this is an accidental reminder to be sillier. To be silly in the safe way.
So how do I practice silliness? Anytime I’m running in the park and I see that someone has left a chalked Hopscotch outline on the pavement, I adjust my path so that I can play. I used to run across the George Washington Bridge from New York to New Jersey several times a week. Everytime I passed the line that calls out the separation of the states, I’d jump across the line and treat it like a power up in a video game.
It also helps when you have the privilege of loving someone who embraces the silly with you. When I was traveling for a week without my partner and needed him to take up watering duty of my tiny plant, he sent me photos of the lil foliage in different locations—playing games together, making music, etc.
It can be easy to take the world too seriously. Perhaps our silly is our survival. Perhaps our silly is how we heal.
How are you practicing silliness this week?
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