Before I knew words like “ritual,” I knew the feeling of it.
Play wasn’t random. It had a rhythm. A loop. A strange sacredness to it—like my hands were doing something my mouth couldn’t explain yet. Lining up figures. Replaying battles. Setting scenes. Re-ordering the shelf until it felt right. That wasn’t mindless repetition.
That was repair.
As kids, we used toys to translate the outside world into something we could survive. We took fear, anger, curiosity, loneliness—and we gave it shapes. We created manageable stories with beginnings and endings. We gave chaos a costume and a name so we could face it.
And sometimes the ritual wasn’t loud. Sometimes it was silent. Sometimes it was me staring at a perfect line of Star Wars figures while the rest of my room looked like a disaster. My room could be chaos—but that formation? That was sacred space. That was me creating order from the noise, not in the room… inside me.
That’s why I don’t clown the adult who reaches for a figure on a shelf and just holds it for a second. That moment isn’t weird. It isn’t childish. It’s the body remembering what the mind was trained to dismiss.
We were conducting ceremony before we knew we were conducting ceremony. And if you’ve ever felt that little “ahh” in your chest when your shelf is finally set just right, don’t downplay it.
That’s alignment.
That’s your nervous system saying, “Yes. This is mine. This is safe. This is true.”
Now, Go Play!