Terry Hershey

“God and the soul are eternally at play.”
Meister Eckhart

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
Plato

“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
George Bernard Shaw

“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.”
Ovid

“The world is your play ground. Why aren't you playing?”
Ellie Katz

“It will be gone before you know it.
The fingerprints on the wall appear higher and higher.
Then suddenly they disappear.”
Dorothy Evslin

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
Tom Robbins, writer

“Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.”
Henry Vandyke, poet, clergyman, educator

“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Today is an ordinary Sunday. I'm sitting at my patio table. There are remnants of the New York Times, an empty coffee mug and a blank notepad with pen. My assignment is to write about play. I wrestle with the automatic knee jerk compulsion to want to say the right thing. But it gets caught up in the maelstrom of cultural expectations about performance and it makes my head hurt. So I get another cup of coffee.

Out on the lawn, my eight-year-old son, Zach, is sketching a Western Red Tanager. The Tanager (a male with a vibrant reb and yellow jacket) spent the morning splashing in our pond. We don't see Tanagers much, so when they make an appearance, everything else on the to-do list gets demoted.

My notepad is still blank. There is to much swirling in my head to organize my thoughts, so I take a break and wander down to one of my garden beds where a David Austin rose has bowed to the weight of blooms, all canes akimbo, doing its best imitation of the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. It needs staking, and I notice a convention of bees delighting in the hardy geranium nearby, entertaining themselves with a musical mantra, some kind of a monastic a cappella, and I take a hit of the rose, a concoction of cloves and some unnameable soap from my childhood, which all reminds me of last night's meal, Chicken Adobo in garlic and soy and white vinegar, with a 1996 Domaine Tempier Bandol Bordeaux made in heaven, or at least that part of France which is closest to heaven. So I walk back to the house to see if there's any wine remaining, pausing to watch one of our cats chase a butterfly, until he admits defeat, and rolls for a spell in the gravel, basking in the afternoon sun. Back in my chair on the patio, I sip my Bordeaux, the perfumed terroir of spring earth and compost, and watch Zach and his friend run through the sprinkler on the lawn.

They squeal. Literally. Poster children for enthrallment.

They live by the philosophy that if the day doesn't have a fine game worth playing, it's a good time to make one up.

I realize that I have conveniently forgotten to stake the rose.

If I were pressed, I would say that play is living without an agenda. But that almost sounds like some kind of a dictum. And I swear by the philosophy that anytime we reduce life to a one sentence dictum, it's time to detox. For me it's garden ambling, sometimes with a nine iron in my hand, to practice my golf swing and whack a couple stray practice golf balls into the woods. At dusk, I listen to the birds do their make-shift choir (it's like a pick-up game of baseball, whoever shows up in the woods on this night gets to sing). I have a friend who kayaks in the eddies and canals that connect all the lakes in central Florida and another who sits on his boat around midnight out in the inter-coastal waters in total darkness and listens to music, and another who hikes in the woods where the trees are the size of cathedrals and the earth smells of history and rain, and still another who goes fishing without really caring whether he catches any. After all, it's just the fishing that seems to matter.

I've told the great story about a research project with children who have been put into a room with new toys. The study was to determine which toys the children enjoyed most. After twenty minutes or so, playing with all the new toys, the children spent the remainder of their time enthusiastically playing with. . .all of the boxes that the toys came in.

I still laugh-out-loud when I picture it.

Children are wired to be fully alive. To see. Wired to derive joy from that which is simple. From play. It is a byproduct of engagement. There is no need for stuff to entertain, or occupy, or preoccupy, or distract. There is no constraint to control.

Scott Russell Sanders observed that, “For the enlightened few, the world is always lit.” Which is another way of saying that the requirement for enlightenment is pretty straight forward: let yourself live like a kid.

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”
—Heraclitus, Greek philosopher

To put it another way, someone once said that miracles are simply being in the right place at the right time. And kids see miracles in simple boxes.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood, play gives way to some need to be preoccupied, distracted and important. Remember the movie Big? Thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin wants to be big, and gets his wish from a Carnie game genie, lives in the city, and becomes a huge success working for a company making and selling toys. Slowly, he loses his little-boy ways, and absorbs an adult perspective and demeanor, replete with busyness, stress and the need for accomplishment. His friend Billy comes to his office with news about the machine, which (they both hope), will reverse the spell.
Josh: Will you please leave? I've got a deadline to meet.
Billy: Who. . .do you think you are?
Josh: HEY!
Billy: You're Josh Baskin, remember? You broke your arm on my roof! You hid in MY basement when Robert Dyson was about to rip your head off!
Josh: You don't get it, do you? This is important!
Billy: I'm your best friend. What's more important than that, huh?

Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.
—Abba Poeman(Desert Father)

But, in point of fact, we do. We give up play for some measurement(s) designed to weigh our accomplishments. Hence our tendency to make play and wasted time synonymous. We become oblivious to the Jewish heritage of Sabbath, reminding us there is one day a week, set aside, to literally, waste time with God. (I read that Seneca, with cynicism in his pen, noted that the Jews waste one-seventh of their life.)

Here's our conundrum. Play as a synonym for romping in and reveling in the day's simple pleasures is a tough sell in our “important-people-have-no-free-time-world.” In a world where our “can't miss” technology guarantees to give us more time. Yet, in the end, we live out of breath and out of time.

And we see less,

taste less,

listen less,

smell less,

touch less,

and savor our own fullness less.

So it's not really about play. It's about being awake.

What Rudolph Otto referred to as, “Mysterium Tremendum.” Translated, it means “the bare mystery of simply being.” Or, in the words of CS Lewis, talking about joy, “I was overwhelmed by spine tingling elation.”

We seem to lose that early in life, don't we?

And that something is happening to people younger and younger. I read a recent statement by a nine-year-old boy who said he wanted to “be inside because that's where all the electrical outlets are.”

There's no advantage to taking a moral high road here, but I do believe that indoor play is an oxymoron. Because play leaves no circuit turned off. It means being alive in this world—playfulness—squarely in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of this day.

This much I'm certain of: Like everything else, our culture has turned play into some sort of an achievement, a contest, a beauty pageant. And in the end, it kind of defeats the point. Someone noted that in this culture. . .

. . .we worship our work,

. . .play at our worship,

. . .and work at our play.

We treat play as if it is a problem to be solved, and we counter with a book on Play for Dummies redolent with activity appropriate checklists. As if play is something to be accomplished. We add play in our jitterbug of activities, feeling duly accomplished with our new found ability to multi-task.

I sit on the back deck and watch my son dance to the Mamas and the Papas, barefoot in the grass. And there is something wonderfully cathartic in the immersion of play that reorganizes life's priority list. That stab of well being to the marrow of our bones, and you know it and sense it but find yourself unable to describe it, or write about it, or teach it for that matter, which is all well and good keeping it free from the panel of judges that call the shots on whether life is worth living. This much I know: Play clears the cob webs of busyness and public opinion. Helps us step out of that space where we have been wading through the cultural waters of life by proxy. . .in today's newspaper alone, I was invited to fret and marvel over a baby picture worth over 4 million dollars, be interested in an upswing in the number of people who are getting liposuction, including their knees (because we all know the humiliation of fat knees), reminded of a can't-miss-stock-pick, and motivated to buy some new book that will allow me to visualize a new me in just seven days.

No. Play is about another space. Where music, laughter, friendship and wonder are birthed and nourished. Or, in the words of Flora Colao,

“we need to play so that we can rediscover the magical world around us.”

In Dante's Divine Comedy, there is an ascent into heaven and he hears a sound he had never heard before.

“Me sembiana un riso del universo,” he writes. It sounded “like the laughter of the universe.”

And laughter, Kierkegaard told us, is a type of prayer.

So it wouldn't hurt to change the way we talk. We ask, of each other, daily, “What do you do?” Or, “What did you do?” Why not ask, “What surprised you today? What made you smile? Where did you laugh? When did you play? And where did you see God incognito?”

It is coffee hour. You know, that time after church service when we sip coffee or tea and chat about the weather, or the week, or the sermon (especially if it was lacking and needs rectification).

Above all else we are aware of the self-conscious nudge, that worry to look right, to keep appearances. There is a script here. It is about decorum, and there is a code of conduct unwritten, but unwavering. Outside we hear the laughter of children. One young boy, maybe six years old, enters the fellowship hall looking for his mother, his face is flush, his hair supercharged, and his new Sunday School pants grass stained and torn. His mother hides her irritation with skill, but not without effort. “What on earth?” she says to her son. “I just needed to tell you I made a new friend,” he reports, and he is out the door before he can be reigned in. Onlookers shake their heads, sympathetic with the young mother, thankful that their days for dealing with such shenanigans are over. They return to their conversations, about projects completed, and projects yet undone. And they don't notice that one of their own, he long past sixty, has snuck out the back door to join the game of hide-and-seek on the church lawn.

Hug o' War

I will not play at tug o'war
I'd rather play at hug o'war
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug
Where everyone kisses
And everyone grins
And everyone cuddles
And everyone wins.
—Shel Silverstein

It is late afternoon. The sun is still warm. A consoling narcotic. The hummingbirds are at the feeder, bickering or exhilarated, I can't tell which. My son wants me to pitch wiffleball and I had some great insight about play I wanted to capture before it is unretrievable is the clutter of my mid-life mind.

But I can't recall it.

I pitch to my son. He hits the ball and cheers as he runs to first.

My insight doesn't seem that important anymore.

I was just wondering. . .

“If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.”

—Professor Jerome Singer, Yale University