The other night I sat down with my 2-year-old son at his little half-height table and cracked open a brightly-colored four-pack of Play-Doh.  As the lid came off of the first can to reveal the cylinder of raw creativity within, the familiar scent of the popular toy caressed my memories like a favorite old sweater.   Even being probably 20-odd years since I’ve played with it, the smell and feel seemed to be the same as it was back then when I was younger, smaller, and less on my mind.

I shook the blob out of the can and into my hands and then worked it up a bit before gently laying it out in front of my son.  “Touch it,” I urged him, smiling as I watched him press a finger into it.  For the first time he connected with an extremely classic toy as a complete newcomer — and I think he was instantly hooked.

As we pressed out shapes with cookie cutters, smashed the Play-Doh with our palms, pressed out our handprints, curled “snakes”, and rolled balls to make snowmen of unrealistic colors, I reveled in the simplicity of our playtime.   Like other classic toys — blocks, Crayons, puzzles — Play-Doh is only a barebones medium for what your mind can envision; it is still up to you to create something from the shapeless mass.

In some fashions, the ability to take a material like Play-Doh and shape it into anything at all is analogous to our abilities in life.    The situations, people, and opportunities we face every day are very often shapeless forms; how we perceive them, interact with them, influence them, and build them into something else determines how we function and where we go.

This doesn’t always apply, of course — life is also full of cookie-cutters.     They are the forces that shape and pre-define limits and boundaries to the events we interact with.    This can be problematic; we may have a star-shaped hole to fill and can only find a rectangle piece; we try to massage it into the right shape, but we may very well end up with a shapeless mass that is even worse than useless.

There is at least one property of Play-Doh that we do not, unfortunately, get very often — the ability to SMASH.   Create a crappy-looking car out of dough?   Grab it in both hands and squish it back into a lump from which can emerge something new.    Screw up and blow the job interview?   They look poorly upon people smashing their offices in an attempt to change the situation.    Time does not take well to do-overs.

Three hours later we finally packed up the Play-Doh into its cans and put all the cutters away.   Keston cried when we finally put it away, saying that he wanted to keep playing with it.   I explained that it was late; we really needed to put it away, go to bed, and get some sleep, but maybe we could play more tomorrow?    He was thoroughly convinced that this was the prime time to be playing, but we eventually got him redirected and back to a happy mood for a trip upstairs to bed.

I wonder what he thought about this first experience with being able to make something out of practically nothing; of directing his own input into an unbounded matter.    Did he feel empowered by the ability to make whatever he liked of the situation?   Scared to have a lack of definition and instruction on what to do?  Or did he find it amazing to make a mistake and then to simply — erase it?

It will be years before he makes these same associations and analogies, but as we fell asleep that night, I hoped that he will always find in himself the ability to create, to change, to influence, and to shape the world and his reality to a new and better day.    If he’s lucky, that will occasionally include yellow cans of squishy-soft blobs in bright colors and a familiar smell that will always bring him home.