My wife and I recently took our daughter on a roadtrip to Philadelphia to do some sightseeing and to eat at a few destination food spots.

On the way back to the car from Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, Isaiah Zagar’s breathtaking mosaic masterpiece and art gallery, we stopped by a local park for my daughter to play for a bit.

As my daughter spun around on the merry-go-round, I heard a mother scold her child for trying to run up the slide. “We don’t go up slides,” she said, “We go down slides.”

This got me thinking about how we view the world. If we only use things in exactly the way they are designed to be used, we are probably going to miss out on a lot of new and interesting experiences, not to mention opportunities to explore and innovate.

Especially as we get older and risk losing our curiosity and playfulness to practicality and cynicism, perhaps we could all do well to run up a slide or two every now and then just to see what happens.