What is Play?
Maybe I’ve been thinking about play all wrong
Play is something that has often felt elusive to me in recent years, or perhaps even much longer. There’s a lot of expectation that comes with play — this is what fun is supposed to look like, this is how you are supposed to feel, you need to act like you’re having fun so that you don’t upset others — that’s not fun to me.
Is it interesting that I just changed “play” to “fun”?
Fun is a feeling. Play is an act.
Or is fun also an act?
Can you play and not have any fun?
Is fun the necessary outcome of play?
Maybe this is where I’ve been going astray.
“When you want to dance, laying down is stress and dancing is release.” — Finding your Way in a Wild New World, Martha Beck
I ran an experiment where I tried to analyze and create the optimal conditions to trigger a sense of play within me. But it’s the sense of play that is hard to fake, and focusing on getting the conditions just right really took the fun out of things. Creating the conditions might nudge you towards a play state, but play can’t be forced. Or is it that fun can’t be forced?
Being in a playful state takes both a lot of mindfulness and an awful lot of mindlessness. Creative play for me can look like puzzling out the plot lines and characters of my fiction writing, or consciously stopping myself from talking myself out of my instincts as I paint or play with clay — don’t think, just do.
“When we’re not taking what is alive in us and making it manifest, this creates the true anxiety of the unexpressed creative impulses.” — The Anatomy of Anxiety, Ellen Vora
What if play is actually simply a state of acceptance?
As a kid you’re told to go outside and play, or now is not the time to play around. You internalize these messages, and some might have come up again and again. And now when similar circumstances arise, you can shut down your play from within without even realizing.
How can you move towards play and away from self critique?
Away from doom and gloom?
Away from heaviness, towards lightness?
I think part of the equation is gentleness.
What if play is presence?
What if play is intuition?
What if play is expression?
Maybe I’ve been thinking about play all wrong.
How do you think of play?