Wellbeing notes: Let your inner child play this September

01/09/2025 at 11:16 am | Posted in Uncategorized, Wellbeing notes | 2 Comments
Tags: Chippenham, hooping, inner child, libraries, play, reminiscence groups, wellbeing

Yes, we’ve long moved on from the days when librarians told you to ‘hush’ in the library. But for older people like me, the conditioning runs pretty deep. Which was why what happened last week felt so very liberating.

The Thursday Club, which meets in Chippenham Library, was set to discuss ‘Favourite forms of exercise, then and now’. Well, in the middle of the session, in a nice space between biographies and cook books, we all got up and took turns hula hooping. Even the librarians had a go. There was so much laughter. And afterwards, one of the group members took us through some simple line dancing moves, which hadn’t been planned but certainly added to the fun.

Hula hoops, like the one shown here, carry the magical ability to make the person using them smile or even laugh, and it seems that line dancing has a similar effect. Maybe the laughter, the sheer feeling of wellbeing, isn’t in fact down to the hoop, or the dance steps. Maybe it’s simply because we’re having fun, we’re playing, in the company of friends old and new. It’s in those moments that our inner child emerges – because whatever age you might be chronologically, in the very heart of you lives your child-self, the being who loves to play, explore and generally have fun.

This September, how might you let your own inner child out to play?

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I love this! I also have very happy memories of us all hula hooping in your garden. I have a home group through church and one of our recent discussions was around what it means to be children of God. One of the things that came up was that maybe we all need to play more! So the following meeting we all brought things to play with – games, arts and crafts, my favourite magic snow and even dressed up in all different hats. It was great fun playing with an age group of 40s to 90s!

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Comment by Laura— 01/09/2025 #

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- We definitely all need to play more! I love the way you describe playing with people of different ages. When we’re having fun, age doesn’t seem to matter at all, does it?
  
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  Comment by Suzanne Askham— 01/09/2025 #
  
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Suzanne Askham