Recently I had the pleasure of attending the wedding of a beloved friend, a young man from China who is in the US in search of his American Dream. I’ve never been to a Chinese wedding before. I’m not sure how traditional this one was, since Peter and his beautiful wife Sharon are Christians now. My spouse and I figure it was a blend of New World and Old, for nearly all of the 80 attendees were Chinese immigrants working in the vast service industries of NYC, painting the nails and massaging the knots out of countless harried New Yorkers, present company included. The wedding was held on a Tuesday night in Queens because the guests work on weekends. We two were the only non-Chinese there. Many of our compatriots spoke no English.

There was a traditional 12 course Chinese dinner served on giant lazy susans embedded within the tables, steaming platters sharing space with fresh packs of cigarettes (no filters, of course), small gift-wrapped boxes with candy and bottles of Chinese liquor that was a cross between vodka and brandy. Real fire water. I have no idea what I ate, and it was all delicious.

Seated to my left was Li Zhongmei, one of the most famous dancers in China, subject of the new book, “A Girl Named Faithful Plum”. She is one of the most interesting people I know, an elegant and fantastically beautiful woman with the skin of a twelve year old and the slender frame of a small bird. She owns the nail salon I frequent, which is how I know the groom and many of the wedding guests.

At the appointed time, Zhongmei excused herself and slipped off to change into a beautiful costume, for she had come to dance for Peter and Sharon. Everyone buzzed excitedly about this, knowing how famous she was back home.

All I can say is that her dance was extraordinary. She moved across the floor like water, smooth and graceful with twirling arms and a face that turned luminous – or should I say numinous – as she performed. There was something about that change in her expression, when her face transformed, that I found electrifying and I asked her about it when she returned to sit beside me.

Was she was aware of how her face changed as she danced? Oh yes, she said, because she danced an improvisation. She explained that a choreographed piece demanded such detailed precision, such focus, that the dancer rarely feels the exchange of energy with the audience. She decided to dance improv in order to connect with Peter and Sharon and our happy crowd. She wanted to honor us and to feel connected with the whole.

“The creation, the gift, is in the improv”, she explained.

Creation is in the improv, in the messiness of winging it, going on instinct, risking embarrassment and failure, the very things we are NOT teaching our kids.

Our children are exhausted. Over-stimulated. Bombarded with academic and social demands from adults and peers alike. Deprived of privacy, not to mention sleep and proper nutrition. “No child left behind” morphing into “no child left unscathed”, where children are slapped with near-impossible demands on their time to produce for the many adults with whom they intersect.

So where is the opportunity for improv and, therefore, for their gift?

Kids need down time. They need time to daydream to access their imagination and time to sleep so they can receive inspiration in dreamtime. All inventors know that rest is as crucial as action. Please find ways, if even small ones, to cut your kids some free time. Let them twirl and dance and laugh and breathe.

It’s all in the improv, after all.

The Importance of ‘Barbie Time’

By Marilee Jones

I once asked a group of high school students how many daydream during the day and few raised their hands.  Most rolled their eyes and finally a boy in the back yelled out, “Dreaming?  Forget it, there are no awards for that.” Everyone laughed at the absurdity of the question.  No one in their lives valued the dreaming time, so they had no incentive and no time to do it anyway.

Every object outside of nature originated first in the imagination of a human being. Just take a moment to think about that and look around you to see the sheer diversity of human-made creations.  In one quick scan around the room, you will find hundreds of examples of the products of human imagination…your coffee cup, the pen you write with, every stitch of clothing you wear.

I like to think of the imagination as the 6^th sense, an organ – not unlike the skin – that picks up information and translates it in ways that then can be examined, manipulated, inverted, reordered.  As far as we know, imagination is a uniquely human sense, the tool we need to create what we want in life.  The blueprints for anything to be created in the 3-D world, for all of human advancement, are formed there. The imagination is the thing that makes us all unique.  Within it lies that little pilot light of individuality that reminds us who we really are.

Yet adults constantly tell kids to stop daydreaming and get back to work. This is particularly troubling because adolescence is the period of intensive self-discovery, the time when kids are supposed to become attuned to their own uniqueness, the time when they begin to differentiate themselves from others.  They need a healthy imagination for that.

When my daughter was little, she loved Barbie dolls.  At first it was a struggle for me to accept, since I never played with dolls as a kid and I grew to become a feminist who believed that Barbies brainwashed girls into becoming focused only on their looks.  But as I watched my daughter script and direct complicated community plays throughout our house, I gave up my resistance and got over it.

One day, when she was five years old, Nora came with me as I ran too many errands for the time I had free.  After the 4^th store visit, I was heading for the mall when she begged me to go home for awhile.  “C’mon, Nora, we’ll run to the mall and have a girl’s-day-out lunch and then do some shopping there.  We’ll have fun. We’ll rest at lunch.”    No, she cried, “I need my Barbie time”.  I reluctantly returned home, whereupon she ran upstairs to her room to play with her Barbies and I collapsed on the couch, feeling resentful that my day’s plan had fallen apart because she needed to play with her dolls.  Forty-five minutes later, she came back downstairs, refreshed and ready for the mall.  I, in the meantime, had lost all of my energy and had to work hard to rally.

Just after that, I participated in the Meyer’s Briggs test where I came to learn how different people recharge their energy.  Some need to be outside in an external environment, around people and light and action – the mall -, like me.  Some need to be alone for awhile, to recharge in their own internal way, like Nora.  I came to see that she was using her Barbie time to recharge and refresh herself.  She was also using 100% imagination with no real point…imagination for the pure pleasure of it.

One of the most serious problems in our culture today is how we adults curtail our kids’ Barbie time, expecting them to do something socially responsible or leading toward an external reward.  A good friend of mine recently bemoaned that her daughter was having trouble fitting in at her new school.  When the child came home from school, she just wanted to go to her room and rest for the afternoon.  My friend was frantic because ‘resting is not achieving’.  She kept urging her daughter to study or read or write or practice her instrument, like the other kids do when they go home from school.  She worried that her daughter won’t be competitive enough to get admitted to a top school.  Her daughter was in 7^th grade, the worst year in all of Girl World.  No wonder her daughter wanted to come home and rest – she was fighting her emotions all day at school.  She needed her Barbie time, her recharging and imagination time, to figure out how to get through another day of catty, bratty girl behavior.

We have done a good job of educating kids about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but we reward workaholic behavior, and in so doing we are substituting one addiction for another. Here’s the simple fact: it’s hard to access imagination and creativity when you are working all the time.

Most importantly, what does it mean for the future of our culture, especially American culture – built on innovation and creativity – when our children have no time to dream?