Good times...

You know those times with friends when the conditions are right, when everyone is energized and full of laughter. Yeah, why are those so rare?

Tonight seemed like another notch on the stick of frustratingly boring nights of nudging my boyfriend to play a game with me. My girlfriends live next door and invited me over. One of them was watching a Miazaki anime and eating candy assembly-line style (nomnom) while the other and I played cards. Says a lot about your town's nightlife when college students default to card games for entertainment. Our fourth member showed up upset about an encounter she had with someone at a bar. We encouraged her to vent and did the classic girl routine of showering her with comments justifying her choices in the encounter while simultaneously bashing every thread of character of this other person. This was about the time our living candy mountain suddenly understood the punch line to every joke every created. She giggled at everything, twisting whatever was being said at that moment into easy amusement. Our fourth confrontational friend decided to feed on this chaos and proceeded to make butt references all night. I would say whoever said girl's don't tell fart jokes is wrong, but it really was only her who did, so I guess only boys and confrontational women do. HA!
Our boy humor girlfriend and I utilized our energy with dance and experimented with yoga poses she had been learning from her class. After midnight three of us randomly went for a walk around the block (again show's what kind of a town we live in that we can just go out walking). I expected a voice to curse out a window at us, we were so obnoxious. Shared stories of crazy things we've done, climbed around and identified each of our individual athletic strengths: sudden accelerated running, hurdling, and climbing (being mine). We wandered around campus finding ways to engage our preferrable activities. I climbed trees and bike racks, boy humor girl raced to and fro, and sugar high girl jumped over benches and firehydrants.
What a relief it was to accept a state of mind where my guards could drop and I could be goofy, competitive, and free to act however feels natural. That play mode that switched on so easily as a kid, when anything could be funny and the simplest things meant the most. Where only the moment mattered. We showed off our talents without any fear of being judged. Tripping was inevitable, but it was laughed off. It all sounds so simple, yet it took me a few hours to reach that state of pure bliss. Seeing who I am in that mindset exposes the contrast against who I portray on a regular basis to the world. When did we forget how to have fun? When did the world cease to be our playground to become our prison?
An essential element of proper stress management is to designate time for yourself. For some that time is spent relaxing in a peaceful environment, or engaging in a favorite activity, pampering yourself. Whatever will provide that comfort or allow the mind to unwind and welcome laughter and fun back in.