Time to retrain the brain

Cleaning bathrooms, even if yours is doing an Old Faithful imitation and turning your linoleum into Yellowstone, is play.

Picking up unlaundered socks for a sniffigant other? That’s play too.

Even cooking liver and onions is play.

Those are among the fun facts a person learns tuning in to National Public Radio — motto: At Least It’s Not Country Music.

You may have heard the show Tuesday about reducing stress by splitting the day into three equal segments:

• Eight hours for work.

• Eight hours for play.

• Eight hours for sleep.

The show detailed how people throughout much of the world are in a rat race. And the rats are winning.

People are working more but getting less done. Due to stress they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. Some people are even suffering nervous breakdowns, or, short of that, sneakily tying the boss’s shoes together during important business meetings.

The discussion focused on whether it was healthy to slow down and get your life in balance, or if that approach is just for lazy people who can’t compete.

The problem reaches beyond the big cities. It can even grip Northeast Oregon, although the pace of life here is generally slower and more relaxed, except when a black bear invades camp.

I have been a student of the work/play/sleep balancing act for years. For many years work took dominance until I realized the rats were winning.

Despite setting boundaries on work, I have yet to achieve perfect balance. Perhaps you face a similar challenge.

Now I tend to “play” more and sleep less. Work comes out even steven.

One reason I play so much is a 30-minute commute, which some people might call work.

But then you could consider all activities getting ready for work as work too, and your life would never achieve balance unless you could talk the boss into letting you work six hours a day.

If you can, I want to meet your boss.

At times on the drive to work I meditate on the dollar I have left in my 401K. Other times I listen to NPR. Still other times I yell at drivers who fail to use turn signals, tailgate, drive the speed limit. Whatever I do, according to the NPR show, it is all fun and games.

I have to retrain the brain about what is play. Everything I used to think of as annoying chores I now think of as play.

Brushing teeth and cooking meals? Play.

Cleaning the cat box. Play. Using the Amazing Lint Magnet and other inventions guaranteed to exacerbate an anxiety disorder. Play.

Noodling about doing yard work is play, and fast play at that when it involves chasing away mule deer with a taste for young apricot trees.

Fighting off peculiar warmongering insects I used to think of as critical work. Now I know that too is play.

Getting irrationally upset over national news broadcasts and letting the blood pressure soar into the stratosphere. Play.

Going to church and doing volunteer “work” are play too.

Receiving unsolicited calls from the uncharitous at the dinner hour is also play, so have fun with them. Try to give the caller as much grief as he is giving you. Entertain them with your public radio voice that sounds as if it is emanating from a culvert.

I may never achieve Martha Stewart neatness. But now that retrieving dust mites from the upholstery and carpets is considered play, I will have fun with that too.

Even relationship-preserving tasks such as twisting ties back onto the bread bags can be construed as play.

It’s time to retrain the brain and turn routine chores into play. You have to do them, so you might as well have fun.

Maybe it’s time we had more fun with our toilet plungers and did our best drum major impersonation. It’s all part of our daily eight-hour parade of play.

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