Play started to feel embarrassing as you got older

Come, let us hunt down this rule, for I suspect you cannot say where you signed it. You never chose this belief; it arrived unexamined — at no point did you reason your way to "play is inappropriate at my age" and decide it was true; it seeped in unquestioned and has been closing doors on your behalf ever since, so the first freedom is simply to see it is a belief of uncertain origin, not a fact. The embarrassment is borrowed, not yours — when you feel foolish playing, the disapproving watcher is almost always imagined, a crowd assembled in your own head, and even its real members are far too busy with their own imagined watchers to spare you a glance; you have been paying for that borrowed shame in the hard currency of your joy. And play like someone who has stopped asking the young for permission — the old man rode his donkey backwards and asked what made them so sure it was he who was backwards and not the donkey''s opinion of forward; play is fully yours at any age, and one who plays late is not childish but alive, so do the delightful thing and send home the version of you that borrowed shame from a crowd long gone. What did you love to do, once, that started to feel too undignified?