I started playing basketball again this summer 🏀

It’s never too late to re-start something fun.

I started playing basketball again this summer (D-league women’s league 🏀😂).

We jog up and down the court, giggly, laughing when we miss a shot or turn the ball over. Nobody sits in the bleachers to yell at the refs or to chant “airball” when we whiff (not that we do).  

It is just pure fun.

And it got me thinking: Where else in my life can I bring back that adolescent-y feeling of running up and down a basketball court, with nothing else to worry about?  

My summers used to be full of library books and freezies and braided hair. My free time meant bike rides to get ice cream, shooting hoops on a chain-link net, and spending hours at coffee shops with my friends.

And I’m resolved to bring some of that back, even in adulthood.

So today, I’m sitting at the Caribou Coffee that’s smack-dab in my hometown – the same coffee shop I used to walk to a few times a week with my friends after school. (Every town has that place.)

I sent a message to the middle school girls I mentor, along with my little siblings who are in high school, and told them I’d buy them frozen caramel macchiatos (or whatever they order these days) if they want to swing through to say hi. A few of them said they’d take me up on it.  

Making myself available to new activities and new people was part of the deal I made to myself when I decided to become my own boss two years ago. I’m finally keeping up with my end of it this summer.

I hope you can do the same: an hour here, an hour there, where you can make yourself available to new things that might seem goofy, or to the old things that used to give you joy, or to the people you wish you had more time for.

When you do: it’s going to make you a better writer; a better business owner; a better photographer… whatever it is you want to be better at.