Playing Pretend

Pretending is something we all do, no matter our age, to escape reality. As we get older we call it denial, but it serves the same purpose even if it’s not played the same way. When your young all it takes to pretend is a stick. That stick can be a samurai sword, a fairy princess wand, a walking cane, a baseball bat, or a rapid-fire bazooka. Sticks aren’t the only portal for play, but it’s one of the best illustrations of how simple it is for kids to be entertained. Other childhood favorites include giving voices to stuffed animals, building forts out of pillows, and re-enacting epic battles with action figures.

Most of the best pretend games didn’t require anything but imagination. Just picking a character from one of your favorite fantasies led you to an adventure. You could be a lion, a cowboy, a firefighter, a knight, a princess, a witch, the list goes on and on. Young boys usually prefer actiony games, like policeman or ninja, while young girls played endless hours of ‘House’ in their plastic kitchens. More often than not, kids were willing to drop their fears of cooties just long enough to play together in their make-believe jungles or spaceships. Somewhere along the mutual understandings that children share, the story bounced along with no plot or reason, just pointless fun. Over the course of puberty we loose this part of us that pretends, and let others do it for us, by watching movies, playing video games, or reading books. As our juvenile years drift away, we shift our energy into more productive ports than thinking we’re a pirate alien that crash-landed on Neptune. Most of us would like to have one last play date with our imaginations, and see what our matured minds could think of for our next perilous adventure, but we are content to let it stay where we left it; in the glory days of our youth.