By Suzanne Katanic
Approx. 5 min read
It’s the summer of 2023, the first summer that truly feels like the pandemic is over. Our bodies are relaxing again. We’re finally able to travel, go out, and be in the world. The fight-or-flight state our nervous systems have been stuck in is beginning to ease, releasing us back into something we’d nearly forgotten: play. There’s a sweet nostalgia for summers long past — long, lazy, playful days spent splashing in pools and basking in the sun. It was a time when our bodies told us there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, and in our childlike wonder, we believed it.
Nothing crowded our minds away from the present moment. We played with abandon, guilt-free and full of spaciousness. Long days and late sunsets let us forget about clocks and calendars as we became devoted followers of nature’s rhythms.
At some point, though, those carefree days gave way to more adult pursuits: producing, conquering, achieving, attaining. We traded playfulness for productivity. And then, in March of 2020, everything stopped. The message was loud and clear: go home, stay home, don’t gather in groups, don’t go to the beaches or parks, just stay home. We watched our friends get sick; some of them died. We felt scared and sad and worried all at once, and yet we kept working.
Often we worked piled on top of our family members under one roof. We set up offices in closets, under stairs, even in laundry rooms, each of us carving out a tiny cave of productivity and safety. We saw our coworkers’ children and pets wandering through our Zoom screens. We dropped our “office masks” and let ourselves be human, making mistakes, laughing at ourselves, and showing the messiness beneath the polished surface.
In this collective pause, the veil lifted. We saw ourselves and each other more clearly. We re-examined our values. We looked around at our families, our gardens, our lives, and we said we want more of this. We learned we could work and still keep parts of ourselves we’d neglected for far too long.
And then, as the pandemic slowly subsided into its endemic phase, we cautiously emerged from our caves, some of us more slowly than others. Movies? Oh no, not yet. I’m not ready to go to a theater, we said. But then came the summer of 2023: Barbie: The Movie. Suddenly, Barbie was everywhere: clothes, purses, sky-high shoes, bright fun pinks. Play was back.
It wasn’t just about the toy. It was the feeling. The nostalgia of our old toys, for some of us Barbie, for others just that somatic sense of being absorbed in play. Returning to play brings us back not just to a pre-pandemic time, but to a time before we believed our worth was measured only by what we produced. It reminds us of something deeper within ourselves. As Donald Winnicott wrote, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (Winnicott, 1989, p. [insert page]).
His insight is timeless: play is not a luxury, it is a pathway back to our wholeness. In the simplest moments of imagination or laughter, we glimpse who we really are beneath the stress and striving. As Winnicott also reminds us, play is the language that lets us speak what we often cannot say outright. “Play is the universal language through which the child or adult communicates what is happening inside.” In play, we tell the truth about our desires, our fears, and our hopes — even when we can’t find the words.
Like the first buds of spring breaking through frozen ground, life is returning, bit by bit, playful moment by playful moment. Maybe this summer is the perfect time for a nostalgic movie and a gentle reminder: relax, play, and let yourself enjoy being alive.
Reference
Winnicott, D. W. (1989). Playing and reality. Routledge. (Original work published 1971)
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