Something happened to me, slowly, over years. I stopped being fun.

I was never close to being muppet-level fun, or even sitcom-level fun, but I was at least average. But this weekend, I finally realized how far I’ve fallen, and how much of a stiff I’ve become.

This realization, poetically, all started with a ball.

It’s as if it was magnetic. Within minutes of showing up at the park, a first or second grader approached Robert after noticing the ball at his feet.

“Hey, you wanna play soccer?”

And then, our Kindergartner began shedding his armor of quiet and shyness. His confidence and voice gradually returned, his personality emerging from behind his protective shield.

And for the next 40 minutes, he had a buddy. Sure, Bo came back and forth to the safety of outstretched hand. Mostly, though, he didn’t need me. The ball helped him transform - from being a little boy hurt by words and elbows on the playground, into just a little boy, running and smiling.

That’s the magic of the ball.

The magical, magnetic ball is his life preserver when he’s lost in a new place. The magic ball does the heavy work, bringing others into his world, when he’s too afraid to invite them in. The ball gives him a focus point, an entry point into friendship and being part of a group.

The magic of the ball, any ball, is that when a ball arrives, play follows. The ball is a vessel, the conduit, for the magic of play.

Play is liberation. It lets us run, skip, express, create, and be. Play is fun. It brings joy, relief, refuge, and laughter. Play is medicine. It helps us bond, repair relationships, recharge, and heal.

I also need this magic.

Bo already manifests my two biggest neuroses: the need to be perfect and the need to be affirmed by other people’s praise. I transmuted these shackles onto him because of something I’m role modeling - he’s too young to have just inherited these behaviors from the culture.

I’m not even trying to be, and I’m so damn serious all the time. I focus, plan, and do dishes in an almost militant manner. Do I ever have fun and play around? If I do, it’s when my sons are already asleep.

But how do I even play? How do I take a status meeting and make it feel a little more like play? How do I take the chore of washing dishes and make it into a game? Somewhere along the way, I became a robot that does tasks and managed a scheduled instead of a person who plays around.

How could I have let this happen? To be sure, I consider myself a lucky man. My life has a lot of comfort, joy, meaning, and love. But what happened to fun? Somehow, fun is something I used to be. Play is something I used to do.

I don’t want to live like this. How did we let ourselves live like this? When did it happen? How do I get out of these chains of drudgery and seriousness?

One answer, it seems, is right in front of me. I have to be more like them. I have three sons, and they play all the time. For some part of the day, I need to put my serious face away and just mimic them. I need them to be my role models, instead of me trying to be theirs.

They are the vessel; they are my conduit. They, my sons, are my magic ball. Through them, I can find the part of me that is fun again. They, if I let them, can be the liberators of the bondage of seriousness I didn’t even know I had.