Care is Play
If we lived in a world where play was prioritised, we could be looking at a world where cooperation and collaboration are the norm.
Every Friday between now and the beginning of February, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from my third book, CARE: The radical art of taking time. This is in part to celebrate her release in the UK and North America, and in part to say thank you for being part of this wonderful corner of the internet throughout 2022.
Today’s excerpt is all about play. So important, yet so difficult to soften in to. Hopefully it will unlock something in you as it did for me when I wrote it.
Enjoy! xx
PS. We’re still offline, but will be back at the beginning of February. Take care and I’ll catch you soon.
I was nervous to write this chapter.
I know that I have been too self-conscious to play in the past, too afraid to do it wrong, too embedded in my adult brain, thinking my very important adult thoughts about very important adult business.
Play just wasn't in my DNA, so how could I write about it?
But if play wasn't in my DNA, why would I choose to:
sit in a modified carriage, propelled around a track at heart-pounding speeds, lifted to great heights and plunged back towards the earth, screaming my lungs out, hands in the air
spend a blissfully unproductive hour colouring in
play loud music and twirl around my house with rhythmless abandon
take a beautiful picture, break it into 1000 odd-shaped pieces and spend a weekend trying to put it together again
run away from my kids and hide under my bed, stifling the giddy laughter that rises in my throat, trying not to give away my position as they search the house
slide down a grassy hill on a flattened old moving box, squealing, only to run back to the top of the hill and do it again and again and again
stand at the top of a snow-covered mountain, click two lengths of fibreglass and wood to my feet and slide on them all the way to the bottom, only stopping to look out at the valley below.
And, given all of these choices, why did I spend so much of my adult life believing that I wasn't a playful person?
It turns out the problem wasn't me. The problem was what I thought play had to look like.
For the longest time I believed that play needed to be the obvious kind. The childish, exuberant, quick to laugh, first in line to tell a joke or start a game of charades kind of play. The kind of fully immersive, get on the floor with toys, make-believe play that abandoned me around high school.
I didn't realise that visiting an interactive museum exhibition was play, or that carving a watermelon for Halloween (my preferred southern hemisphere option) was play. I didn't realise that making up one-word-at-a-time stories around the dinner table was play or sliding down a waterslide or experimenting with hairstyles or practising crow pose was play.
But they are.
Play can be as delightfully varied as people. In fact, that's part of the problem when it comes to defining just what play is. While its benefits are very real and very powerful, even the psychologists who've built careers studying it find it difficult to accurately describe, because what constitutes play for one person is stressful, boring or frustrating for another.
The only widely agreed-upon definition of play is that it's needless, involves some aspect of imagination, leisurely (not to be mistaken with easy), enjoyable and fun, and the motivation to do it is intrinsic, that is, it comes from the process, rather than the outcome.
All of which means I'm not going to write a list of reasons why play is good for you and why you should do it because that would take a needless, enjoyable activity and turn it into a should. A need. A to-do. It would be to go full adult on play – and there's no real fun in that, is there?
I suppose though, the question does need to be asked: why do so many adults struggle to be playful?
As we grow up many of us become more serious versions of our younger selves, stuck in the turning cogs of life, less likely to slip spontaneously into playfulness.
In my own, very unscientific research (i.e. conversations I’ve had with people I know – most of whom are parents), there is a heaviness that seems to attach itself to play once we have kids.
On the face of it this seems counter-intuitive. Wouldn't having kids make us more likely to spend time in play mode, not less? In my experience, the answer has been a definitive not-so-much because, while I found myself playing more frequently, rarely did it feel light or loose or enjoyable, like play used to feel when I was young. It often felt (forgive me) like a chore.
It felt like something I had to do because, as parents, we know that children learn through play and benefit enormously from it, as do our relationships with them. I was playing with them to help their development and deepen our bonds – things I both wanted and needed to do. By definition, it was not play for me.
When I pair this with my mistaken belief that play was solely the domain of the young, it's little wonder I felt heavy and guilty about it much of the time.
I'm not advocating for a world where we stop worrying about serious issues in order to play LEGO all day. But if play inspires awe and wonder in us, if it promotes creativity and problem-solving, if it encourages empathy and compassion (which it does), how might it improve our efforts in solving serious, grown-up problems and making the world a more compassionate, egalitarian place?
Poverty and inequality and voter suppression and corporate greed and political corruption will not be played away but don't worry that stepping away from these problems in order to play means you will miss an opportunity to enact change. Your advantage will be the different perspective you bring when you return. The questions you ask, the assumptions you jettison, the lightness you feel – these can all be agents and catalysts for real change.
Something else I keep returning to in my own exploration of play is that in order to try to recapture some of that lightheartedness I experienced as a kid, I often turned to drinking. Being drunk wiped out my inhibitions, let me dance freely and laugh loudly, head thrown back. It afforded me a heavy-handed kind of playfulness and allowed me to be funny, daring and, honestly, a bit of a pain in the arse sometimes.
I wonder whether the reason (or at least one of the reasons) many people drink or use drugs is to regain that sense of lightness and freedom we used to have as children. When it was okay to dance in the middle of the supermarket, you sang for the joy of it and didn't give a hoot whether it sounded any good.
Drinking offers a buffer of confidence or self-assuredness, whereas sober playfulness somehow feels more vulnerable.
As adults, I also think we're scared to appear immature in our play, so we avoid all but the sanctioned kind of play – competitive play – or mistake play for simply another kind of work.
We believe that if we're going to spend time playing, we need to see measurable, quantifiable benefits. Purposeless, needless, leisurely, intrinsically motivated – these ideas don't really compute in a society fixated on efficiencies. If life is a series of tick-boxes, play doesn't feature on the to-do list.
Fitness-related or competitive play are some of the only types of 'acceptable' play that adults engage in. It's not widely accepted to finger paint or make daisy chains or build sandcastles or play imaginary games (unless, of course, you're doing it with, or for, kids), but strapping on some footy boots and trying to win a game is, because the aims are clear: to get fit, to follow the rules and score more points than the other team.
Even playing a musical instrument is an example of our complicated relationship with play. Learning the ukulele is fine, but it's really only seen as productive if you're practising your chords, learning your songs and making obvious progress. Tooling around, seeing what chords sound good to your untrained ear, feeling how the strings reverberate – that's a waste of time. Where's the recognisable song? Where's the measurable improvement? Where's the output that shows, yes, I am being productive in my downtime?
Drawing a distinction between play and work is difficult for a lot of reasons, made more so for those who work for a company that's trying to embrace the 'play at work' philosophy.
In an effort to both incentivise employees and create a work environment that maximises productivity, there's been a big push by large organisations to incorporate play into their office space (at least in pre-Covid times). While there is research suggesting that amenities such as a games room or basketball hoop, or department vs department scavenger hunts are good for morale, and a paper by Erin Woolf published in Management Research Review in 2014 suggested they also resulted in higher levels of engagement and better creative performance, is at-work 'fun' still fun?
I mean, if these things are genuinely enjoyable to employees, then that's a good thing. But when work-life balance is such a challenge for so many people already, maybe this is just another example of wellness trends being turned into shoulds, have-tos, need-tos?
Perhaps the answer isn't to enforce play at work, or believe that all work needs to be enjoyable, but rather to create a system that encourages employees and business-owners and freelancers and work-at-home parents and students to strike a better balance between work and not-work, opening up time for them to find their own types of play away from the workplace.
Perhaps even acknowledging that the reason employees may be stressed or getting sick or resigning isn't because they lack play at work, but because they feel pressured to answer emails at night, they no longer feel the weekend is a respite from the office, or insecure work arrangements mean that they always feel on-call.
It might seem like a waste of time to daydream or doodle without any particular purpose, but the truth is we cannot operate at full capacity all the time, and the 'wasted time' that play represents is downtime, which is vital for our wellbeing,
What we're really grappling with when we see play as a time waster is our perception of what's worthwhile.
Yes, there is a good deal of research explaining, the importance of play for both children and adults, but I find myself wondering if it's the unquantifiable benefits that are just as, if not more, worthy of our time:
the elevated feeling after dancing around your living room
the single-minded peace of learning how to make pottery
the shared jokes and sense of belonging that stem from the mud-fight you had with friends
the never-ending renditions of 'Mustang Sally' from your karaoke afternoon
the sense of shared connection that comes from playing a pick-up game of basketball with strangers.
There is nothing wasted in these experiences. In fact, they fill the gaps between work, family, school, community and all the various obligations we have in life, forming a vital buffer of lightness, fun and meandering joy between the often more pressing requirements of adulthood. Without these buffers, we might find ourselves becoming what we've tried so hard to avoid – inefficient and unproductive.
What would happen if we prioritised play?
Imagine, for a moment, a world where play is encouraged, where it's no longer seen as immature or a waste of time or something we have to do with our kids, but rather as a vital part of any day, as important as drinking water or getting enough sleep.
Given what psychologists have already discovered about play and its benefits, we would be looking at a world where cooperation and collaboration are the norm, as opposed to individualism and an all-pervasive, me-first mentality.
A world where we feel lighter and more energetic, where our mental health and relationships are strengthened and we feel a sense of belonging, trust and connection. Where we spend time simply enjoying activities for no reason other than they're enjoyable, and where devoting an hour to sketching or daydreaming or geo-caching or playing board games is not a waste of time but an important part of our everyday lives. Where joy is a valid reason for doing something.
None of it because we need to, but because we understand how important, how vital, how fun it is to simply play, and even though the world we live in may not value it, that doesn't mean we can't.
10 ways to practise play if you have…
Half a minute:
If you walk past a playground, stop and swing on the swings for a minute, or play at the park alongside your kids
Jump on a trampoline
Spend a few moments between meetings colouring in or doodling.
Half an hour:
Practise handstands In a swimming pool
Play dress-ups with your fancy clothes or costumes
Have a jigsaw puzzle out on the table and spend five minutes a day adding to it
Play with your pets.
Half a day or more:
Head to a ropes course, or go abseiling
Head to an amusement park and ride the biggest roller-coaster you can find
Sign yourself up for an open-mic comedy night and try stand-up (or just go and watch).
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